MUSIC REVIEWS : Salonen Conducts Chamber Program

Esa-Pekka Salonen illuminated the works of two 20th-Century greats but let the music of an earlier giant slip into the shadows of misunderstanding Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Of course, in his account of Berg’s Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin, Salonen also had the passionate advocacy of pianist Jeffrey Kahane and, especially, violinist Thomas Zehetmair. In Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphosen,” he had sensitive contributions from several first-desk players, including concertmaster Sidney Weiss and principal cellist Ronald Leonard.

But with Mozart’s great C-minor Serenade, K. 388, he had the limelight essentially to himself.

Zehetmair is the kind of violinist who must get his whole body into his playing. Here he lunged and rocked back and forth as he sought--and achieved--increasingly intense expression from a deliberately chosen frail, private and meditative beginning. Yet his music-making was never out of control or misjudged technically or conceptually.

Kahane played with full, rounded tone, rolling phrasing and fleet accuracy. Not for him the notion that 12-tone music is supposed to be acerbic, aggressive, impersonal, unlikable and generally nasty.

Except from some gymnastic hops and hyperactive arm-beating, Salonen appeared to be the cool head in charge of it all. Yet virtually every flick of a wrist or shape in the air brought an immediate and appropriate response from the soloists or the 13 alert wind players.

In Mozart’s Serenade, however, the conductor concentrated on getting crisp articulation of rhythm without paying much attention to shaping phrases expressively.

He offered little give and take, light or shade, contrasts in gesture. Inevitably, sheer beauty and evenness of sound, it seemed, became an ideal, at the expense of drama and character. The virtues of this kind of approach consist in a certain transparency of texture and balance in ensemble.

But surely it is possible to have that and much more, besides. It was hard to accept such bubbling-brook Mozart in one of the composer’s most personal outpourings of grief, anger and frustration.

All was redeemed, however, with a devastating performance of Strauss’ war-influenced “Metamorphosen” to close the program.

Where Salonen had been rigid, even martinetish, in controlling Mozart’s music, he was expansive in letting Strauss’ long lines breathe, unfold and blossom, and also succumb to the weight of grief.

He propelled the playing through all potential pitfalls, kept the textures lush without being cloying, dense without being obscure, and never wavered from honoring the composer’s purposeful design.

Clearly the Second Viennese School holds no terrors for him, nor does the twilight of post-Romanticism. Mozart, on the other hand, remains an inexplicable problem.