MUSIC REVIEW : Salonen Leads Bruckner’s Third Symphony at Bowl

Esa-Pekka Salonen closed his four-program Hollywood Bowl visit this summer the same way he closed his portion of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s spring season in May--with a two-work program offering elegant brevity in the first half, followed by an early intermission and the swollen rhetoric of Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony in the post-interval.

Thursday night, Salonen’s willing Philharmonic colleagues again covered themselves with glory in a pristine, handsomely contoured, practically transparent performance of the D-minor Symphony. The immaculate nature of the playing, of course, only underscored, for the unconverted, the paucity of the Austrian composer’s inspiration.

Still, faced with this genuinely admirable achievement, one could understand again why Bruckner’s humorless, endlessly self-conscious symphonic essays attract conductors and listeners: They drip with aspiration and sincerity and the longing for spirituality.

Salonen & Co., who take this work on their 11-city European tour next week, have polished their rather unsmiling performance to a shine, finding the quiet places and savoring them with all the naturalness they lavish upon the large and numerous climaxes. For some listeners, these wondrous contrasts are only more proof that the Third Symphony is mostly air; for others, such readings confirm the sublimity of the composer’s text. Chacun a son gout.

In the short first half of this concert--heard by a reported audience of 9,834--Olli Mustonen, Salonen’s 27-year-old Finnish countryman, became the accomplished soloist in Maurice Ravel’s universally beloved Piano Concerto in G. Mustonen sought and found striking articulation and easy fluency in the familiar work--his technique is abundant and reliable.

Even so, this proved no definitive performance.

With all the overstressing of melodies and brilliant, brittle playing, both pianistic and orchestral, the many subtleties of the work evaporated in the night air. Mustonen/Salonen got its rhythmicality and much of its jazziness, but little of its insouciance. There is magic here, but it emerges only from an aura of understatement and indirection. In all, this was as un-Gallic a reading as one might imagine.