Mehta Fails to Make the Case for Messiaen

A longtime champion of the music of Olivier Messiaen, guest conductor Zubin Mehta used his second-week’s program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to revive two of the composer’s middle- and late-period, birdcall-besotted works. Not incidentally, the first performance, Thursday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, took place on what would have been Messiaen’s 90th birthday.

The spiritual content of the late French writer’s music is well known and justifiably celebrated. Such content may inform both “Oiseaux Exotiques” and “Couleurs de la Cite Celeste.” What one perceives first in these quarter-hour works, however, are grating, irritating aural surfaces, not spirituality but noise.

Whatever their actual artistic content--Messiaen said that “Couleurs” was inspired by, and even contains, quotations from the Book of Revelation--both pieces sound unpleasant and discomforting. Is cacophony beautiful? Choose a side.

Mehta did little to clearly unravel or shape these loud and brassy compositions--both are scored for large chamber ensembles of winds and percussion. Instead, he allowed them to assault the listener without any compensating musicality. He may love this music, but he wasn’t able to transfer to the observer his affection for it.

Pianist Gloria Cheng-Cochran, like Mehta another Messiaen specialist, was the expert and virtuosic soloist in both works, with different configurations of colleagues in each. These were admirable, easy and careful performances, despite the lamentable noisiness of the results.

The oddball second half of this event brought on most of the Philharmonic, with violinist Vadim Repin as soloist. Repin played another French work, one seldom heard indoors, Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole,” and did so with flair, panache, elan and striking technical command.

Stylistically, he left nothing out; musically, he made the old chestnut sound important. In every moment, his fingers went where the composer directed and he took no false steps in an effective, smile-causing performance. Mehta and the orchestra proved felicitous partners in this detailed revival of Lalo’s treasurable work.

* The L.A. Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta, repeats this program tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $11-$65. (323) 850-2000.