Philharmonic Sheds Light on Sun Themes

There was sunshine--lots of it--pouring down from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Wednesday night. But there was gloom--lots of that too--in the auditorium. The atmosphere at the Los Angeles Philharmonic has gotten strange.

The sunshine was in the music. At the beginning was Nielsen’s “Helios” Overture, in which the score conveys the sense of sunrise, its Danish composer happy to be free of Nordic gloom on vacation in the Aegean. Beethoven’s Fifth, at the concert’s conclusion, is a musical journey from stormy agitation to the sun heroically blazing through the clouds at the finish. In between, Mitsuko Uchida, the pianist on Berg’s Chamber Concerto, lit up the stage in her own kinetic fashion.

The gloom in the audience was the result of many empty seats. A new mood prevails at the Philharmonic. It no longer maintains its sunny disposition in the face of grim reality. Feeling a reality check is in order, it has stopped papering the house. Saturday evenings and Sunday matinees still fill the theater, but weekdays and even Fridays do not. Wednesday’s attendance was depressing.

In the end, the new policies may serve the orchestra well as it sorts out its economic situation, but not now. It must dishearten performers to look out at empty seats. It certainly diminishes the audience’s sense of occasion. And it dulls the classical music life of the community. How gratifying it was to have those free tickets given to eager listeners of classical music radio stations, or, better yet, to students. The Chandler Pavilion, moreover, sounds better--warmer, fuller, more alive--with bodies in the seats.

That may help explain why Wednesday’s program didn’t quite catch fire as it should have, given its many interesting aspects. Never less than competent, the orchestra could not uniformly convey the impression of every player merging into a single monumental organism, as it did with spectacular regularity last season. There was virtuosity, but the voices sounded individual.

In Berg’s Chamber Concerto, which is for violin and piano soloists and 13 wind instruments, that individuality, however, was appropriate. The score is Berg’s most intricate, a complex matrix of thematic interactions. The themes are full of character, and their conflicts are full of drama.

The violin soloist was Mark Steinberg, who is mostly known as a chamber musician--he is the first violinist of the Brentano String Quartet. He is a calmer player than Uchida, for whom Berg’s music was a great drama and a great dance, boisterous and full of life. But his clean tone and care with phrasing made him a satisfying complement to her. There was impressive clarity to the wind playing; Salonen was alert to details.

That used to be a worry, however, about Salonen’s way with Beethoven; it could be too classically cool and collected, some complained. But, in fact, his Beethoven is not any one thing. His was still the classical approach with the Fifth on Wednesday. And the hard edge to the orchestra’s tone may have been an attempt to reproduce the drier tone of period playing on modern instruments.

But Salonen’s was also an interestingly 20th century Beethoven. He seemed to start from rhythm, using the famous opening motto to set off a kind of Beethovenian rite of spring. There were surprising cataclysms; the recapitulation of the first movement was magnificent. Salonen balanced clarity and weight; the rubatos in the last movement felt almost Ligetian, the winding down of a big machine that can barely be controlled. The Scherzo was surprisingly slow and heavy, but the transition to the Finale was splendidly controlled.

Nielsen’s overture to the sun is a 10-minute controlled nuclear explosion. The playing was harsher than it needed to be, but effective nevertheless, and still a wonderful way to begin the concert.

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* Los Angeles Philharmonic, tonight, 8, and Saturday, 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $11-$65. (213) 850-2000. In place of the Berg, the Philharmonic will substitute Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, with Uchida as soloist, for the final two performances.