Music Reviews : Beethoven’s 5th, Two Premieres at Pavilion

A world premiere, a Los Angeles Philharmonic premiere and Beethoven: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s penultimate program of the orchestra’s winter season offered a little bit for everybody.

And everybody seemed to show up; according to Philharmonic officials, the first of four performances of the music director’s Rodriguez/Carter/Beethoven program sold out the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Thursday night.

The obvious reason was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which closed the program, but those who came only for that should have been pleased by the bonuses: the world premiere of a 90-second but splendid and ear-opening piece by Carlos Rodriguez; the Philharmonic’s first performance of a 52-year-old work by Elliott Carter, and, counterbalancing the C-minor Symphony, a Beethoven overture, not coincidentally, in the key of C.

Carter, in the half-century since his Symphony No. 1, has become celebrated for the seriousness, intellectual rigor and convoluted rhetoric of his style. That early work, though different in many ways from the admirable works which have emanated from the American composer’s writing desk since the late 1940s, shares Carter’s fatal virtue, complexity.

It sounds jolly, it sounds likable. As played with virtuoso jauntiness by the Philharmonic, it is accessible, brilliant, often tonal, even bucolic. But it has many layers, inner workings and continuous subtexts, and it is cram full of activity both melodic and mental. A first hearing--which for most in this audience this was--proved charming.

Rodriguez’s contribution to the Philharmonic’s 75th anniversary string of fanfares netted a joyous, pleasantly raucous and compelling short piece for 17 players, 15 of them brass. “Fanfarria para Los Angeles”--there’s an angel/city pun in there--commands attention, not least for all the music the 33-year-old, New York-born composer makes resonate in less than two minutes.

After all this welcome excitement before intermission, Beethoven’s Fifth, afterward, continued the parade of breathlessness. Under Salonen’s brisk leadership, the familiar work did not turn out over-fast or over-loud, though it flirted with both.

Ensemble proved reliable, solo lines clarified, tempos articulate, if pushy. The orchestra played splendidly. Yet one felt only a modicum of compulsion or conviction in the overall. What seemed missing was a certain transparency, a certain urgency that could have been achieved in a less goal-oriented and more probing reading.

Earlier in the evening, much the same could be said about Salonen’s staid, rather than spacious, leadership of Beethoven’s “Consecration of the House” Overture.

* The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Rodriguez/Beethoven/Carter program will be played again Sunday at 2:30 and Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tickets $6-$50, (213) 850-2000.