MUSIC REVIEW : Reynolds Premiere Overshadowed at Philharmonic

The big news at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Thursday should have involved the world premiere of a major opus by Roger Reynolds.

His ambitious, somewhat forbidding new symphony--commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic--brackets “The Stages of Life” as a portentous subtitle.

But the large audience mustered a lot more enthusiasm for the Three Bs: Bronfman, Bartok and Beethoven.

The cheers seemed easily justified in two of the cases. The first two.

Yefim Bronfman dominated the concert with a dazzling performance of Bartok’s Concerto No. 2 for piano and orchestra. In this rare instance, the puffy adjective really seems imperative.

The pianist approached this craggy, technically staggering challenge with incredible strength and stamina, not to mention fearless dexterity.

He may have blurred some of the heroic bravura in the opening allegro, but his fierce energy, uncanny authority and thundering bravado made the losses in crispness seem virtually irrelevant. And when Bartok allowed a fleeting flirtation with lyricism in the adagio, Bronfman responded with as much dreamy introspection as the anti-sentimental context would allow.

The protagonist was, without a doubt, brilliant. His work was precisely complemented, moreover, by Salonen and the Philharmonic at their muscular, attentive best.

Salonen and his followers mustered similar degrees of propulsive frenzy for Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which followed intermission. Unfortunately, the intrinsic nobility of the piece proved less accommodating.

This was a young man’s Beethoven, brisk and brusque, fast to a fault, boisterous at best and raucous at worst. It was the sort of Beethoven we used to deplore in the dark and distant days of Zubin Mehta.

One could admire the breathless excitement of the wild climaxes. The crowd on hand certainly did. One also could lament the absence of sensitivity, grace and poetry on the way.

Salonen is, if nothing else, a man of keen modernist sensibilities. At the beginning of the strenuous evening, he obviously did his best to clarify the rhetoric and to unravel the linear knots of Reynolds’ “Symphony (The Stages of Life).” Still, he seemed to be fighting a losing battle against turgid modernist cliches.

Reynolds explained his complex structure and multi-layered compositional motives in a generous annotation. In this large-scale sonic essay, we are told, he was concerned with “metaphorical subjects,” with “primary periods in human life” as depicted in corresponding self-portraits of Rembrandt and Picasso.

The composer interspersed programmatic quotations from Sibelius and Schumann with his own systematic explorations of linear development. In the last of the five parts, he “interweaved all six thematic cells in a slower, contrapuntal summation that is nevertheless marked by the willful categoricalities of advanced age.”

The intellectual convolutions are fascinating. Their musical translations, however, remain stubbornly murky.

Reynolds keeps an essentially percussive orchestra very busy for 28 carefully ordered minutes, juxtaposing subtle textural shifts with jarring rhythmic ticks and brash harmonic clashes. For all the surface movement, the music sounds oddly, monotonously static. Perhaps it will reveal its expressive and dynamic secrets with repeated hearings.

Call the premiere a succes d’estime . That’s polite.