‘Fabulas’ an Ambitious, Uneven Piece

Between works evoking the beginning and ending of eras, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic played the third premiere of the season on Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The new work, Carlos Rodriguez’s “Fabulas,” commissioned by the Philharmonic, was nestled between Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony and Shostakovich’s devastating Violin Concerto No. 1, with Midori as soloist.

A large-scale and ambitious piece, the 15-minute “Fabulas” is twice as long as the orchestra’s earlier Rodriguez commission, “Pasacalle” (1993), and many times longer than the 90-second “Fanfarria para Los Angeles,” which the Los Angeles composer contributed to the Philharmonic’s 75th anniversary season in 1994.

The new piece is structured, according to the program notes, in an intricate way reminiscent of medieval scholasticism. It is a series of musical phrases elaborated from anagrams derived from a 12-letter phrase based on 12 notes.

After an arresting opening, the work meandered amid episodes of stasis and drama. What you heard were short sections of recurring phrase patterns, often brilliantly and complexly orchestrated and embodying a mix of styles. Some sections cohered powerfully, but the work as a whole didn’t, although Salonen and the orchestra gave it alert, bright attention.

Taking an almost bel canto approach, Salonen placed Mendelssohn at a point where romanticism emerges from classicism.

He reinforced the past by taking the repeat in the first movement and using a smaller orchestra (53 musicians) seated in the once-traditional flanking pattern on stage. He evoked the new spirit by emphasizing song and transparency. It was a vernal, refreshing and lovely account of the music.

If Mendelssohn was a beginning, Shostakovich marks an end, more and more summarizing the anguished and tortured Soviet era.

Somehow Midori, 24, and Salonen, 37, entered deeply into his spirit, giving an intense and probing reading of the First Violin Concerto, which has formidable demands but is no showpiece. They were overwhelmingly expressive, and the orchestra was a fully sensitive partner in the project.

* Esa-Pekka Salonen will lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the same program today at 1:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $6-$58. (213) 365-3500.