MUSIC REVIEW : Robert Spano Conducts Philharmonic at Pavilion

At Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this week and next, guest conductors born in 1961 and 1960, respectively, take over the podium occupied up to now in this new season by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen (who was born in 1958).

There are important reasons to showcase younger conductors, of course, some of them being chances to discover big talents early in their careers, to give them opportunities for which they may be grateful later, to titillate audiences with the provocative perspectives gifted young people bring to familiar music. And so on . . . .

Still, and despite respectable, if regularly scrappy, performances turned in by our Philharmonic, on Thursday night one looked hard to fathom reasons to display the still-forming virtues of 31-year-old Robert Spano, the American musician formerly an assistant conductor to Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony.

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Certainly not to re-educate Philharmonic subscribers to the charms of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, which closed the evening in perfunctory and pedestrian fashion. Probably not to accompany veteran pianist Alicia de Larrocha in the straightforward beauties of Beethoven’s B-flat Concerto. Hardly to import to our existing center of new-music activity a needed contemporary expert to conduct the local premiere of a recent piece by Steven Stucky. The why is a mystery.

Not unpredictably, then, the first half of the event (repeated tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.) outclassed the second, which contained that ordinary Tchaikovsky reading. Stucky’s “Impromptus for Orchestra” (1991), an 18-minute symphonic canvas of engrossing charms and intriguing rhetoric boasting haunting solo lines and transparent instrumental textures, captured the listener’s attention and held it rapt. The orchestra performed these four brief movements expertly.

Larrocha’s familiar eloquence--she has now played on numerous occasions with this orchestra in the 39 years since Alfred Wallenstein brought her to Los Angeles for her U.S. debut--made Beethoven’s so-called Second Piano Concerto even more welcome than we might have expected.

As always, the graceful virtuosity and pristine articulation Larrocha commands found perfect residency in the composer’s thoughtful reversion to Mozartean elegance. She is a pianist whose taste and refinement are counterpoised by energetic projection; that is, she plays for her composer and her audience, forgetting neither. As a result, she herself becomes unforgettable.