Back With a Passion

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s sojourn to Paris--much reported in these pages--is ended. A month of Stravinsky is over. Eager French crowds, an enthused foreign press, post-concert street life are no more. Gone, too, is the orchestral sound--bright, loud, in-your-face--of the Cha^telet Theater, and in its place the smoother, bass-shy, less immediate acoustic of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Gone, perhaps, but not forgotten. The opening concert of the orchestra’s new season Thursday night at the Music Center, with Mahler’s Second Symphony, proved an obstinate continuation of Paris.

There is, of course, not a great deal in common between Stravinsky, a composer who preferred not to overtly practice the emotions in his music, and Mahler, who poured them in by the bucket. But Esa-Pekka Salonen, who began his fifth season as music director with this program, is a committed Stravinskyan in nearly all things. So what little there is in common between Stravinsky and Mahler, Salonen managed to find and exploit in a brilliant, if downright peculiar, reading of one of the greatest and most monumental symphonies of the last century.

Mahler’s Second was, at the time it was completed, in 1894, the most ambitious symphony ever undertaken. It lasts an hour and a half. It utilizes an enormous orchestra. It incorporates chorus and solo soprano and mezzo-soprano. It sprawls through five movements. And it attempts to set out an entire philosophy of life, to come to terms, through musical argument, with why we are here and what it all means. Is there a God and afterlife, Mahler pulled his musical hair out in wonder, or are we suffering for nothing?

Mahler wrote explanatory programs for the Second Symphony over the six years it took him to compose it, and threw them out, one after another. But he did keep the programmatic title, “Resurrection,” and he did let it be known that the symphony was to represent the rise from the darkest, most tormented depths of his angst-ridden soul to the most exalted sense of affirmation.

Salonen’s version, however, doesn’t appear to have much use for that kind of overt sentiment. The 38-year-old Finnish conductor seems much more interested in the phenomenal wealth of orchestral detail in the score. Mahler was a composer of loaded instrumental gestures, and often gestures that can be read in more than one way. He was a composer nostalgic for the past but always pushing techniques and forms into the future. And Salonen locks into the push.

The result may not reach too deeply into the heart, but it does go directly for the listener’s head and gut. Salonen makes instrumental details stand out differently than any other conductor has attempted. He seems to challenge Mahler, as if saying, “OK, you want to try something new and different by making that bassoon line of detached notes stand out, then I’ll show you just where that sort of thinking can lead to.” And where it can lead to is the kind of radical music Stravinsky would, a few years later, write for “Petrushka” and “The Rite of Spring.”

Salonen’s provocative approach could not possibly work without genuinely exciting playing from the Philharmonic. And, indeed, what may, in the end, be the most convincing aspect to his Mahler is just how well he has convinced the performers to follow him. The Philharmonic played Thursday with the sharpness of a razor, making every detail attention-getting and fascinating, and the big climaxes of the first and third movements simply hair-raising. The singing, as well, whether from the beaming soprano, Janice Chandler, the clear-toned mezzo-soprano, Monica Groop, or the stalwart Los Angeles Master Chorale, was absolutely reliable.

Salonen’s Mahler is not an obsessive Mahler-lover’s Mahler. The conductor doesn’t exhibit nearly enough angst for that. But he has found his own way into the composer. And at the final, glorious peroration, with brass blaring, soloists soaring, the chorus singing as if from on high, and everyone in the orchestra exactly in place, the sound was thrilling all by itself and needed no philosophy.

Stravinsky, I’ll bet, would have loved it.

* Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Mahler’s Second Symphony again tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $8-$60. (213) 365-3500.