Salonen Sustains Much Force, Little Sentiment

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s hair looked fine, as always, Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But our young maestro seemed to be having a bad orchestra day.

He opened the subscription concert by the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a dull and dutiful 10-minute nod in the direction of formula modernism. The composer on display was David Soley, a 31-year-old Panamanian trained at Cal State Northridge and Stanford. His not-so-magnum opus, already performed by the New York Youth Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra, was titled “relieves (repousse).”

The annotation by Jim Svejda, abetted by Soley himself, told us nothing about the idiom and little about the focus of the piece.

We did learn, however, that relieves means reliefs in Spanish. We did not learn that repousse means chasing or embossing in French.

While aiming “to raise various musical types in relief,” the composer seems to have cranked out a six-part atonal muddle in a faceless academic mode. It all sounded all too familiar.

Salonen waved his arms efficiently, if listlessly, in response to the generic challenge. His players appeared to play the correct pitches. The non-capacity audience applauded tolerantly.

Then things got worse, with Mozart.

Mozart!

For the concerto centerpiece, Salonen chose the sublime D-minor flourishes of K. 466, which served as a showpiece of sorts for the 23-year-old Norwegian wunderkind Leif Ove Andsnes. Neither the conductor nor the pianist, alas, found the opportunity very rewarding.

Salonen set the lethargic--no, make that perfunctory--scene with the primary stress on speed. Forget charm.

While you’re at it, forget sensitivity. Also elegance, lyrical grace and brooding drama.

Andsnes followed the leader with a bright, technically secure dash over the solo hurdles. His fingers certainly are deft. On this difficult occasion, however, his interpretive impulses tended toward the prosaic if not the mechanical. His most interesting idea involved the somewhat jarring appropriation of extended, convoluted cadenzas by Mozart’s protege Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

Svejda’s quaintly purple program-note heralded “ineffable longing and unspoken regret” in the patently abstract Romanze. (Unspoken regret?) The protagonists remained steadfastly immune to any threat of sentiment.

The temperature rose a few degrees after intermission when Salonen returned to terra cognita with Sibelius’ Second Symphony. Home at last.

Other conductors have found more mystery in the opening, more tenderness in the andante, more delicacy in the scherzo. Still, one could admire the heroic thrust that Salonen sustained throughout, not to mention the expansive thunder with which he focused the final, reluctant cadence.

This was the voice of Sibelius--a big, loud voice--as heard by an impetuous young man. It made sense on its own grandiose, energetic, sometimes raucous terms.

Introspection will come later. We hope.