BBC Orchestra: Splendor to the Max : Music review: Half a Wiltern concert finds Yan Pascal Tortelier conducting standard repertory; the other half focuses on the rugged modernism of Peter Maxwell Davies.

Ask anyone to name the world’s best orchestras. (It’s a popular, though futile, all-American game.)

You’ll get lots of different answers. Chances are, the BBC Philharmonic,

which made its U.S. debut Sunday night at the Wiltern Theatre courtesy of UCLA, won’t be on many lists.

This isn’t a razzle-dazzle glamour ensemble. It doesn’t flaunt a history of superstar conductors in residence. It doesn’t seem to enjoy the services of an over-oiled public-relations machine. Situated in Manchester for 60 years, it cannot claim to represent any center of the musical universe.

But don’t underestimate this orchestra. If it always sounds as it did on this occasion, it definitely deserves big-league recognition.

The strings really shimmer. The woods focus unusual warmth. The brass muster force without strain. The choirs are sensitively meshed, and, as experienced in the flattering (i.e. very live) acoustic of the Wiltern balcony, the instrumental timbres are remarkable for transparency and poise.

There is virtuosity here, in depth. More important, perhaps, it is virtuosity cloaked in elegance--the brutal zonk of the “Pictures at an Exhibition” finale notwithstanding.

The English always did have good manners. And now they have a French conductor, a conductor who obviously savors finesse, clarity and, where possible, sensuality. The combination of virtues is interesting.

The conductor in question, Yan Pascal Tortelier, has served Manchester only since 1992. Son of the marvelous cellist Paul Tortelier, he is remembered in Los Angeles for a surprise debut with our Philharmonic last November.

He opened the generous (perhaps a bit too generous) program with Ravel’s “Rapsodie Espagnole”--which he somehow managed to make wild and neat at the same time. It’s a considerable feat. He closed the evening with a properly propulsive tour of Mussorgsky’s beloved picture gallery with Ravel serving, of course, as ever-colorful guide.

Between these samples of Great Symphonic Hits from the past, our visitors reminded us that they have at least one foot and a hunk of heart firmly planted in the 20th Century.

Make that the recent 20th Century. To be specific, make it the 20th Century as experienced in the oeuvre of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who is listed as official composer-conductor of the BBC Philharmonic. Born near Manchester and a graduate of the Royal Manchester College of Music, he savors ties to the orchestra that are geographical as well as sentimental. According to his biography in the printed program, he is “known to all as MAX.”

Spry and eager, Max led his merry men and women (lots of women) through two substantial premieres: the first American performance of his Trumpet Concerto, completed in 1988, and the first West Coast performance of his “St. Thomas Wake: Foxtrot for Orchestra,” which dates back to 1969. He also provided verbal apologia, witty and rambling, from the podium (with the audience kept literally in the dark, the notes in the program served little immediate purpose).

The Trumpet Concerto manages to do several things at once, and does them all imposingly. Within a bleak yet accessible harmonic idiom, it establishes a telling, intelligent dialogue between bravura soloist and multifaceted orchestra. It invokes the stark pictorial aura of Maxwell Davies’ adopted home in the Orkney Islands--birds, wind and sea. And it assumes the dramatic force of an incipient opera, with the trumpet impersonating St. Francis.

The score revels in sudden shifts of color and texture. Even in the state of abstraction, it never loses narrative coherence, and it makes its programmatic points with economy. There is lots of flash here, and ultimate pathos, too.

Hakan Hardenberger, a Swedish magician whose mentors included Thomas Stevens in Los Angeles, played the impossible solos with laughing ease. Maxwell Davies provided the sort of orchestral framework that makes complexity seem logical.

*

For all its cleverness, “St. Thomas Wake” struck at least one listener as a lesser success. The piece suggests a rather literal documentation of a war-time experience that found the young Maxwell Davies listening to old fox trot records while the Luftwaffe bombarded Manchester. The composer introduces some snazzy band tunes--filtered, for some reason, through a John Bull pavan--and contrasts the innocent pop stuff with portentous tones of symphonic cataclysm.

The juxtaposition is daring, startling and moving, at first. With repetition, however, it invokes a dangerous flirtation with gimmickry. There is a lot of repetition here, figuratively if not literally.

The audience at the Wiltern, capacity 2,314, responded to everything with palpable enthusiasm. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very large audience.