Conductor Takes Turn as Composer

Say this for Esa-Pekka Salonen. He likes to keep lofty company.

For the Philharmonic program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Thursday, he chose difficult but relatively small-scale challenges by Stravinsky, Mozart and Beethoven. And, in the middle of this popular-masterpiece agenda, he plunked a little bagatelle of his own, “Mimo II.”

Interesting billfellows.

Salonen’s trusty players may be beginning to show signs of late-season fatigue. There are only five programs to go. But the ever-engaging, ever-energetic maestro keeps on chugging.

So, for that matter, does his 11-minute opus for solo oboe and percussive chamber-orchestra. In its U.S. premiere, “Mimo II” did not make the earth move. But it did suggest that its composer knows how to write bright, brash and bracing busy-music that is unlikely to offend the conservative masses.

The piece, completed in 1992, represents an orchestral expansion of a study called “Second Meeting,” which merely employed oboe and piano. Los Angeles heard that version at a Green Umbrella concert in April, 1993.

“Mimo” means mime , and the composer explained the connection in a rather skimpy program note: “Imagine the face of a virtuoso, painted white, with facial expressions changing like shadows. Everything is acrobatic: the improbable shifts of the body and eloquent hand positions. . . .”

In case anyone cares, this is not a sequel. There is no “Mimo I.” The composer intended that label for a wind quintet he began in the early 1980s. “It’s a dead duck,” Salonen says with characteristic eloquence, “so I threw it away.”

The audience reaction for “Mimo II” turned out to be reasonably enthusiastic if hardly ecstatic. One fan downstairs mustered a lonely standing ovation. The rest of the crowd just clapped.

*

It clapped for a nonstop bravura performance by Carolyn Hove, who normally plays English horn with the Philharmonic but served here as oboe protagonist. Although her tone did not invariably dominate the accompanying ensemble, she made her instrument chatter with breathless abandon. She found no linear zigzag too quirky, no rhythmic U-turn too dangerous.

The orchestral accompaniment toyed with kaleidoscopic color-shifts. But the Gallic transparency to which Salonen reportedly aspired often remained elusive.

What should have sounded spontaneous tended to sound studied. What might have seemed impetuous ended up seeming mechanical.

Salonen explains, incidentally, that “Mimo II” evolved from musical ideas scribbled on scraps of paper and then thrown on his kitchen floor. Blinking at aleatoric convention, the composer reassembled the pieces, he says, with careful whimsy. Perhaps it’s time to return to the floor.

As regards the rest of the program, the best came first--with Stravinsky’s quasi-neoclassical Concerto in D, written in Los Angeles in 1946. Salonen treated its wry and dry convolutions with tender, almost sentimental care.

*

Ironically, that tender, almost sentimental care might have been more useful in the music that followed. Salonen did his best to keep Mozart cool, however, as he accompanied Imogen Cooper in the C-major Piano Concerto, K. 467. And he brought the evening to a raucous close with a needlessly--heedlessly--fast and furious performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8.

Cooper, not heard with the Philharmonic since her local debut under the not-late but lamented Kurt Sanderling in 1984, played the fast movements with stiff efficiency, for the most part. Despite some lovely nuances, she turned the exquisite reverie of the “Elvira Madigan” andante into a rather brittle exercise. Sighs and whispers remained conspicuously absent.

Her most interesting contribution involved the choice of cadenzas by Radu Lupu. He provided a series of volcanic blurs in the first movement and, in the last, an exercise that looked back at sweet “Elvira” before breezing on to allegro-vivace business as usual.

Salonen predicated the Beethoven Eighth on speed, muscle and surface excitement at all costs. Forget the grandeur of Carlo Maria Giulini. Forget the poetry of Sanderling. This was a brutal performance that recalled another Los Angeles tradition.

Remember Zubin Mehta.

* Esa-Pekka Salonen will repeat the same program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets $6-$50. (213) 365-3500. He will conduct “Mimo II” and the Mozart Concerto, together with Stravinsky’s “Firebird” today at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets $17-$45. (714) 553-2422.