MUSIC REVIEW : A Sunny Return to Pavilion : After an absence of two months, Esa-Pekka Salonen took up his L.A. Philharmonic post again this week, leading an engrossing program.

Forget inclement weather, threats of floods, traffic tie-ups and sluggish commuting. When Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Thursday night, the latest subscription concert became the sunniest of occasions.

Salonen and his colleagues in the orchestra can take proper credit when this series of performances, ending Sunday afternoon, is over, but the two composers represented on this program must also be given their considerable due. Performers live or die on the quality of the works they play; the stronger the music, the better their opportunities.

Claude Debussy has long since left the planet, but the white-haired Gyorgy Ligeti, bounding up an aisle in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, looks to be lively and energetic at 69. It couldn’t hurt him, of course, that two of the Hungarian composer’s works received loving re-creations at this event.

Putting together this agenda, Salonen obviously used both aesthetic and practical considerations toward his audience’s benefit.

He employed a contingent of women’s voices from the Los Angeles Master Chorale in three of the four works; more important, he revived two ecstatic Debussy works, “La Damoiselle elue” and “Trois Nocturnes,” to frame the fantastical core of this program--Ligeti’s recent Violin Concerto and his “Clocks and Clouds” (1973).

In giving his listeners a full range of sensuousness, lushness and aural provocation in all these pieces, the conductor also created an unusual juxtaposition of repertory that has sometimes been ghettoized for its consumers. Anyone who paid attention to these performances Thursday night must have left the hall more awake and more alert than when he entered.

The bonus was in the playing and singing: splendid performances across the dynamic spectrum, with almost no haphazard or slovenly moments. The instrumentalists of the orchestra performed with keen awareness of the requirements of strength and finesse in these scores; the accomplished women singers of the Master Chorale lived up to their renewed reputation; the soloists displayed high virtuosity.

Saschko Gawriloff, the German violinist to whom the Ligeti Concerto is dedicated, made his L.A. Philharmonic debut (at 63!) on this occasion, giving what seemed to be an incisive performance of a highly complicated and fragmented but clearly apprehensible work.

In its 1992 revised version, the now-five-movement piece engages the listener with a sequence of emotionally connected passages: some nearly inaudible, some presto-misterioso, some aria-like, some pure cadenza, some which do nothing but ascend a long crescendo.

The heart of the work is the fourth-movement Passacaglia in which the composer builds tremendous tension leading to a cathartic finale. Using an accompanying symphonic body of just two dozen players, the 29-minute piece is nevertheless a large-scale, large-structure achievement. The composer enthusiastically shared his bows with Salonen, Gawriloff and the orchestra players.

Dawn Upshaw was the radiant, text-illuminating, utterly controlled protagonist in “La Damoiselle elue,” assisted with inspired vocalism by the visitors from the Master Chorale, conductor Salonen and the singing narrator, mezzo-soprano Paula Rasmussen.