Music Review : Salonen Offers Preview of Tour

Soon to depart on a tour that will take them to Mexico and the East Coast, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are using this week’s concerts at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to hone the traveling repertory.

As heard Wednesday night in a muscle-flexing program, they don’t have a whole lot of honing left to do. Impressive sounds and polished performances were on display.

Still, Salonen played things rather close to the vest. For better or worse, this was cool and objectified music making, the conductor’s and players’ personal views generally left out of it, or, perhaps more accurately, beside the point.

The evening’s highlight was an ultra-snazzy run-through of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. Here, Salonen and orchestra made the most of the showcase aspects of the work, revealing a huge dynamic range (with a wow-’em pianissimo), bold, glittering and pastel colors, impeccable solo work, precise ensemble and monumental climaxes. It would be difficult to ask for more, even though one occasionally felt like doing so.

Here and there the music didn’t seem to be as cute as it needed to be, or as elegant and gracious as it could have been. These things take a personal effort on the part of the conductor, which Salonen didn’t appear willing to make.

Cellist Ronald Leonard, on sabbatical this season from his duties as a principal in the orchestra, took on the sardonic, rapturous Cello Concerto No. 1 by Shostakovich at midpoint in the program. In a technically commanding performance of the difficult score, Leonard projected an intensity throughout, with especially searing and purposeful accounts of the Moderato and Cadenza. The fizz was missing from the outer movements, however, perhaps because of the slowish tempos or the not quite fluent or fully characterized orchestral accompaniment. Jerry Folsom offered giant horn solos.

Beethoven’s Overture to “The Consecration of the House,” a neo-Handelian work of considerable bluster, opened the event in a reading capturing all its oratorical fervor and knitted-brow solemnity.