Music Review : Mixing the Moods of Mahler and Rouse

Christopher Rouse and Gustav Mahler, the two composers represented on this week’s Los Angeles Philharmonic program, have things in common. Both are symphonic builders of aspiring, large-scale works characterized by fragmented complexities, sweeping emotions and musical manic-depression.

Yet their separate styles--Rouse’s aggressive, unself-conscious, late-20th century eclecticism and Mahler’s bittersweet, sometimes fragrant end-of-Romanticism idiom--can complement and illuminate each other. Rouse’s Violin Concerto (1991) and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony (1900), as conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thursday and Friday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, proved that.

The concerto, which in moments sounds cheerful but ends finally in an organized mire of postmodern pessimism, was written for Cho-Liang Lin, the soloist on Thursday. It is a work of ever-changing moods, sudden tempo shifts and a musical language of severe dissonance. Because Rouse’s landscape is always evolving, the piece exerts many charms. Yet, when it is over, an acidic residue remains.

Lin, with his customary ease, traveled Rouse’s difficult, challenging and complicated route easily, and made sense of each separate vignette. Giving the work’s West Coast premiere, conductor Salonen and the Philharmonic showed every evidence of an affectionate familiarity with the note-loaded score.

Looking under the pleasant rock of Mahler’s Fourth, Salonen seemed to uncover in the first movement some disturbing emotional activity. Instead of merely benign, that opening proved conflicted and troubled, evoking Freudian perspectives and an inner musical life not often associated with this work.

But the conductor and orchestra subsequently abandoned such probing, giving the Scherzo its clear contrasts, the slow movement its undistracted emotional focus and the finale its cathartic serenity.

British soprano Joan Rodgers returned to the solo spot in “Das himmlische Leben”--she last sang it here, and with Salonen, in 1985--accomplishing a Mahlerian plateau of vocal freshness, security and textual pointing with seraphic ease.

* After its East Coast tour next week, the L.A. Philharmonic will again play Mahler’s Fourth Symphony on its Dorothy Chandler Pavilion subscription concerts, March 29-30 at 8 p.m. and March 31 at 2:30 p.m. (213) 850-2000. Tickets: $6-$58.