MUSIC REVIEW : Austrian Conductor Triumphs at Pavilion

In three previous appearances on the podium at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion--last year with his touring London Philharmonic Orchestra and two years ago this month with our own L.A. Philharmonic--Franz Welser-Most made inconclusive impressions. He seemed gifted, quirky, brainy and highly musical, but not always solidly routined or self-disciplined enough to wield a consistently viable influence over orchestras more experienced than himself.

This week, the 33-year-old Austrian conductor returned for a fourth visit. Thursday night, Welser-Most produced an unequivocal triumph.

Leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in an orchestral program devoted to symphonies by Martinu and Beethoven and the first in a series of Philharmonic 75th-anniversary fanfares, this one by no less a living master than Witold Lutoslawski, the slender conductor from Linz appeared to reveal the extent of his talents and his current orchestral mastery. In all three works, he showed complete authority and utter conviction. This is no young man playing the role of conductor. This is the real thing, a born leader making compelling music with a resourceful symphonic instrument.

The revelation was Beethoven’s too-familiar “Eroica” Symphony, a work previously heard innumerable times in this hall in heavy-handed, sober and pretentious readings. This one was different: transparent in texture, light-fingered in execution, the inner voices emerging clearly, the total rhythmically steady but never rigid, Beethoven with his senses of humors and his Classical-era sound reinstated.

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The composer’s tempos-wars, no longer raging after nearly 170 years, seem to have been won by those who champion Beethoven’s own metronome markings. Welser-Most adhered to these; not surprisingly, they worked. As always in musical matters, speed is not the issue--sense is. Lightened up, and given its textural side effects and unforced balances, the work is no longer a monument, a behemoth or a bore, but a very human expression of the composer’s kaleidoscopic imagination.

The Philharmonic played this “Eroica”--with an unusual degree of dynamic nuance--like the virtuoso orchestra it is. Before intermission, it brought a related but differently hued, and no less virtuosic, color-palette to the neo-Classicism--filtered through a post-Impressionistic Zeitgeist --of Bohuslav Martinu’s bold and cherishable Fifth Symphony. Incidentally, it had never played this work before.

At the top of the program, a very brief piece no one had ever heard before, Lutoslawski’s new, Philharmonic-commissioned “Fanfare for the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” for brass and percussion, brought the large Pavilion audience to attention with a rousing loudness.