Messiaen Connects With Philharmonic

Olivier Messiaen’s “Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum” (And I await the resurrection of the dead) is more than another of the late French composer’s loud and aggressive tone poems. As heard again at a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert--the orchestra has been playing it with some regularity since 1972--the piece is at its best a deeply religious and listener-grabbing tract and at its worst a colorful mosaic of exotic sounds. However one considers it, it is important Messiaen.

Guest conductor Mark Wigglesworth led a tight realization of the work Thursday night at the first of three performances in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Unlike some Messiaen pieces, this 35-minute essay did not dawdle or lose focus; it proceeds compellingly from a noisy beginning through quiet meditations and ear-opening climaxes to a steady and inexorable conclusion.

Wigglesworth requested, through a program insert, that the audience observe a moment of silence between each of the movements, according to the “wish of the composer.”

The performance, by 34 of the Philharmonic’s winds and a percussion battery managed by seven players, went smoothly and made all its points. The two shattering climaxes on the tam-tams in the third movement came close to causing pain; those are no doubt part of the work’s theology. If this is a piece about the fear of fear--rather than the fear of God--it is successful. Through artful haranguing, Messiaen can make the listener squirm.

The first half of the British conductor’s program offered an uneventful, fast run-through of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 that emerged clean, understated and perfunctory. Despite frequent quickness, this was an unexhilarating “Pastoral” through which the orchestra remained steadfastly uninspired.

* The Los Angeles Philharmonic, with guest conductor Mark Wigglesworth, repeats this program Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $11-$65. (323) 850-2000.