Salonen Leads Odd Itinerary : Music review: Contradicting his cool intellectual image, the maestro puts on a Russian pops concert.

Say this for Esa-Pekka Salonen. He keeps us guessing.

We thought we had our music director pegged as a cool intellectual. We knew he excelled in unraveling the knots of tough modernist challenges, and we invariably admired his work in repertory of any period that demanded more of the head than the heart. But we didn’t think he cared much for hum-along hits, sentimental tricks, cheap effects and Romantic excesses.

Actually, that may still be the case. But he didn’t allow any such aversions to prevent him from scheduling three splashy Russian pops indulgences Wednesday night when he returned to his podium at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

This was, to say the least, a strange evening with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The slush-pump agenda began with the turbulent cliches of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” (shades of “Fantasia”) and ended with the purple sonic prose of Scriabin’s “Poem of Ecstasy” (an escapade oddly akin to symphonic pornography). Salonen & Co. paused along the way for the giddy platitudes of the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s “Prince Igor” (shades of “Kismet”).

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One had to wonder if the program reflected an enthusiasm hitherto unsuspected on the part of the maestro. Or was it just a matter of cynicism? (Give the masses what they want, and all that.)

In the middle of his high-class-junk orgy, Salonen did allow one serious diversion. Matti Salminen, the towering and booming Finnish basso, made his Philharmonic debut singing four poignant excerpts from “Boris Godunov.” It was like planting a bowl of caviar in a bed of marshmallows.

The orchestra played splendidly all night long. Members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, abetted by the Korean Master Chorale, sang their collective guts out, as needed. The audience obviously got its kicks. But the concert left a lot of unanswered questions regarding aesthetic focus, commercial motivation and, yes, standards of taste.

For the “Bald Mountain” exercise, Salonen chose the composer’s original version of 1867, which imposes a leaner sound-scale than the Technicolor edition to which we have become resigned. The orchestration may have seemed a bit restrained, but the conductor made up for that with dynamic flash and thunder. He knew, of course, that this was no time for subtlety.

In the infernal Polovtsian Dances, he moved from frenzy to chaos. It was as if he wanted to see just how fast and just how loud he could deliver the goods, which, under the circumstances, weren’t very good. Borodin’s exotic vulgarities had been added to the bill, incidentally, in place of Mussorgsky’s stark “Songs and Dances of Death,” which reportedly threatened to strain Salminen’s vocal resources in tandem with “Boris Godunov.”

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In the “Poem of Ecstasy,” Salonen stressed the ecstatic rather than the poetic. The overwrought composer really didn’t give him much choice. Inspired, perhaps, by Faubion Bowers’ erotic analysis quoted in the annotations, our introspective leader made the score quiver, throb, slurp, bang, thump, rage and roar with gusto that endangered the assembled eardrums. When it was over at last, even a nonsmoker out front wanted a cigarette, or, at the very least, a cold shower.

Under the circumstances, one had to be doubly grateful for Salminen’s presence. He brought rare dignity, authority, dramatic restraint and psychological insight to the varied agonies of Mussorgsky’s guilt-ridden czar. And his huge, dark, plangent basso cut through the primitive orchestral fabric with ease.

The orchestral fabric, not incidentally, was the composer’s own, as edited by David Lloyd-Jones. Salonen used it tellingly to sustain theatrical tension, and he accompanied the protagonist sympathetically in the process.

If only there had been more of this, and less of that.

* Program repeats at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, 135 N. Grand St., Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. $6-$58. (213) 850-2000.