Conductor’s Debut Reflects His Rapport With Orchestra

A persnickety conductor, Adam Fischer stepped to the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic on short notice Thursday night and led a quirky but satisfying performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The Hungarian musician--at 48 the older brother of Ivan Fischer, more familiar here--deputized for the ailing Franz Welser-Most, changing the scheduled program. Despite a lot of fussiness, which seemed to get in the way of straightforward and fluid music-making, the debut must be considered an auspicious one.

Fischer, in Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 and in seven movements from Kodaly’s “Hary Janos” (the familiar suite, with an additional excerpt from the opera), kept the orchestra steadily engaged in delivering myriad telling details: exact dynamic gradations, from explosive climaxes to almost inaudible echo-passages, for example.

A short and wiry man whose small, unobtrusive gestures nevertheless convey a nervous temperament, Fischer projects the complexity of the score before him; he is the opposite of mellow and expansive. But he commands attention.

All the busy detailing had its merits, but it sacrificed continuity and forward motion and tended to emphasize punctuation rather than content. Nevertheless, the “Prague” Symphony emerged with all its bittersweetness poignantly underlined--in particular its dichotomy of melancholy and pleasure as revealed in the seraphic Andante. And the inner life of “Hary Janos” has seldom blossomed so handsomely, its rainbow of narrative effects glowing vividly. The orchestra played for Fischer with splendid rapport and full cooperation.

The happy centerpiece to this evening was Mozart’s Oboe Concerto, K. 314, in which David Weiss--the Philharmonic’s principal oboe since 1973--was the ebullient, virtuosic soloist.

All the delights of the work came forward, its difficulties dismissed, its complexities unraveled. Weiss, who uses and has reedited John de Lancie’s three cadenzas, reveled in the piece’s challenges. This music makes people smile; this performance spread joy, the sort that recycles itself in memory. Fischer and the orchestra proved impeccable collaborators.

* The L.A. Philharmonic, with conductor Adam Fischer and oboe soloist David Weiss, repeats this program Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $8-$63. (213) 850-2000.