Color the Philharmonic Inspired by Tamayo

Synchronicity--that startling sense that there must be deep connections between unrelated events--is as profound an aspect of art as it is of religion and science. An appreciation of synchronicity makes the coincidental seem meaningful. And the closer one looks at the world, the more of it one finds.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, which does a better job than most orchestras of remaining alert to its time and place in history, offered just such an example at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Thursday night, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting. The original plan had been for the premiere of a new work by Italian composer Franco Donatoni. But it has not been finished, and a substitute was chosen: “Pinturas de Tamayo,” by Steven Stucky, the orchestra’s new music advisor.

The title translates as “Pictures of Tamayo,” and the 20-minute piece premiered by the Chicago Symphony last year takes its inspiration from five canvases by Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. And it happens that a major gift of Mexican art, rich in the work of Tamayo, was recently given to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Tamayo makes a visual splash, and Stucky responds with a colorful orchestral equivalent. In fact, there is no better advertisement for the value of this art than Stucky’s response to it. In an engaging pre-concert talk, the composer spoke of his own chance discovery of the painter while he happened to be visiting Mexico City on Philharmonic business six years ago. One painting, “La Gran Galaxia” (The Grand Galaxy), spoke to him, he said, with epiphanic force.

Like music, Tamayo’s paintings (reproductions of which are on display in the Grand Hall) suggest strong emotions, but we are not always sure which ones. Is that joy, fear or loneliness in the figure of “La Gran Galaxia”? Stucky has no specific answers. Nor is he a musical scene painter himself. There are the bird chirpings for “Amigas de los Pajaros” (Friends of the Birds) and the guitar imitations in “Musicas Dormidas” (Sleeping Musicians).

But the real inspiration from Tamayo seems to be more technical and formal. The brilliant intensity of Tamayo’s color and its complex texture are what first catch the eye, and Stucky knows exactly where the orchestra keeps its brightest pigments. Intricate rhythmic patterns chatter and scales arch--vivid, pulsating swaths of instrumental color. Melodic lines emerge sometimes as interruptions, sometimes as figures against a ground.

“Mujeres Alcanzando la Luna” (Women Striving for the Moon) is an ecstatic study in fast-moving rising scales, which seem less to mimic an arm outstretched to the heavens than to suggest that equivalent power of abstract line moving from one part of a canvas to another and from one register of the orchestra to another.

The Philharmonic knows Stucky well, and he the orchestra. Although written for Chicago, “Pinturas” fit the L.A. players, so bright and virtuosic, handsomely, as it did Salonen’s ear for rhythmic precision and sparkling instrumental detail. All that was missing were reproductions of the five Tamayo paintings in the program.

It could be that the Philharmonic was simply too self-absorbed, since the program was also intended to show off four of its young wind soloists--Marion Arthur Kuszyk (oboe), Monica Kaenzig (clarinet), Michele Grego (bassoon) and Elizabeth Cook-Shen (horn)--who have joined the band in the last three years. Their showpiece was Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-Flat, in which the inspired wind parts are by Mozart but the rest, which was lost, has been badly reconstructed by an anonymous composer. The soloists make a smooth and pleasing team, but they are not heard to best advantage in the Pavilion, which tends to dull darker-toned instruments.

Beethoven’s First Symphony is high-spirited music, and Salonen used it to wrap up the program. He is not yet a complete Beethovenian, but he does bring strengths to the early symphonies, especially in his attention to rhythm and drive. He has been inspired by the early music movement, which also means a small ensemble, focused sound and no dawdling. And a bit more synchronicity in that, because Salonen demonstrates how apt the old techniques are to his own contemporary aesthetic.

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* Only the Mozart and Beethoven will be repeated today at 2 p.m., $5-$26; the full program repeats Sunday, 2:30 p.m., $8-$63; Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 365-3500.