MUSIC REVIEW : Instrumental Martyrdoms, Requiems From Philharmonic

The collection of instrumental martyrdoms, requiems and entombments Esa-Pekka Salonen assembled for his latest concerts by the Los Angeles Philharmonic was daunting enough in prospect. Not surprising, it proved more impressive than cheering in experience, Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Not that raising spirits is an essential concert component. One just wished that all that hard work--from conductor, orchestra and listener--had a bigger pay-off than dazed respect.

Salonen began with the four Symphonic Fragments that Debussy culled from his incidental music to Gabriel d’Annunzio’s huge mystery play, “Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien.” That this was the easy-listening gateway, brimming as it does with a sort of fevered austerity, told you much about the uncompromising seriousness of Salonen’s intentions.

In the theater the murmurous anticipation of Debussy’s music may be fulfilled in the play, but in the concert hall they seem an unsatisfying tease, until the radiant epiphany of “The Good Shepherd” in divided strings. Salonen stressed the antique elements and a repressed spirituality, stretching the fabric subtly to limited effect.

His Philharmonic seemed cautious in its first-ever grappling with this difficult score. When confident, it produced warm, expansive sound, but with much hesitation and uncertainty--corporate and individual--along the way.

Closing the concert was an equally complex, more familiar challenge, Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony. Salonen defined its thematic tensions with incisive control, and his orchestra sounded much happier in its much more conventional assertions.

Between these allusive, metaphoric visions of spiritual trials and ecstasies was Berg’s Violin Concerto, his requiem for Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler. Soloist Christian Tetzlaff has said he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a modernist, but the fashionable concerto is hardly a vehicle of rarefied specialty today: Tetzlaff is the third violinist to play it with the Philharmonic in 14 months.

The young musician brought accomplished skills and pertinent, well-studied sympathies to the assignment. He shaped its passions and arguments with rhythmic point and expressive articulation, his bowing capable of astonishing nuance even in the most arduous multiple-stopping.

Salonen and the Philharmonic backed Tetzlaff with a practiced, eloquent accompaniment, though indifferent at times to the needs of his sweet, slender tone.