Salonen Leads Philharmonic in Stirring Sibelius

After seven weeks under guest conductors, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has music director Esa-Pekka Salonen back on the podium for the last two weeks of its season at the Music Center Pavilion. The Philharmonic often makes exciting music with its guests, but it can work on a wholly other level with Salonen, as in the ultimately stirring and cathartic performance Thursday.

Not that there was anything special in the cursory run through Mozart’s “Magic Flute” Overture. The program was originally slated to open with another installment of the fitful Filmharmonic series of music-film collaborations, but that project has been postponed--not abandoned--Philharmonic sources said.

At the end of the program, however, lay the First Symphony by Sibelius. Here was another world of commitment and passion. Not mechanical precision--there were clunks when Salonen shifted gears sometimes--but an intense feeling of avid exploration and spontaneous reactions.

It began with the memorably haunted clarinet exhalations of Michele Zukovsky. Afterward, at the first bow, Salonen marched through the orchestra to recognize her with a hug, and it had been indeed an astonishing distillation of thematic essences. The other principals acquitted themselves nobly, including a guest principal trumpet, the auditioning Robert Sullivan.

Taken whole or in any of its subsets, the Philharmonic sound was thrilling, vital and flexible. The orchestra proved as commanding in murmurs as in exclamations, filling a not notably responsive room with focused sound at all dynamic levels. Hardly unfamiliar repertory, but here rediscovered with compelling energy.

The concerto spot was taken by Joshua Bell and Karl Goldmark’s Violin Concerto in A minor on Thursday and Friday. (Bell plays the Sibelius Concerto tonight and Sunday afternoon.) His zesty and eloquent interpretation of this tuneful work was delivered with a slender, edgeless sound that left him frequently swamped, despite the accommodating efforts of Salonen and Co. Bell’s playing was sure in technique and true in spirit, but heard to fullest effect only in the two big cadenzas and the limpid frame of the Andante.