20th Century Greats Get the Last Word

The last program by the Los Angeles Philharmonic of the season--and, if you want to get grand about it, of the last full season of the 1900s--revolved around two German composers who had an enormous impact on 20th century music. Both were drawn to momentous philosophical issues, and they didn’t shy from writing music that pondered the meaning of life and of art. Richard Strauss gave us symphonic Nietzsche in “Also Sprach Zarathustra”; Hindemith considered the artist’s spiritual mission in his opera “Mathis der Maler.”

And it has been to this questing side of the composers that Esa-Pekka Salonen has seemed most naturally drawn. About a decade ago he made a poised, abstractly modernist recording of Strauss’ late masterpiece for strings, “Metamorphosen.” Five years ago in London, he conducted an exceptional performance of “Mathis” for a controversially modernist Peter Sellars staging.

So one might expect Salonen, on an occasion such as that Friday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, to have something appropriately sober, deep and pointed to say about the position of these two composers--both of whom began as avant-garde but, in the course of a long career, wound up as reactionary--in the 20th century.

He did have something to say, of course, but it was not that. The Strauss was very early, the Lisztian piano concerto “Burleske,” from 1885, and Strauss’ first really big hit, the tone poem “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” written in 1895. For Hindemith, Salonen turned to music a half-century later with his ballet score for Balanchine, “The Four Temperaments,” and one of his biggest hits, “Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber,” both works written in America.

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This is, all of it, cunning music. Emanuel Ax was the witty, devilish pianist in “Burleske” and “The Four Temperaments.” The mood was downright subversive.

“Till Eulenspiegel” is trickster music, and it set the tone. Salonen led an astonishingly sly performance, illuminating “Till’s” trickery by focusing on the subtleties of orchestration. No apocalyptic end-of-the-century anticipations for Strauss, just the practical joker as imp in the orchestral machine, toying with an exquisite ensemble for the sheer joy of it, not unlike a computer hacker of today. “Burleske” is less daring and less clever (Strauss was but 21), but here too he played with expectations--and Ax’s supple, brilliant and fiendishly pranksterish pianism made it sound a proper ancestor of “Till.”

“The Four Temperaments,” a beautiful and undeservedly neglected score, is a series of four variations on three themes for piano and string orchestra. Hindemith, perhaps reacting to a world gone crazy in 1940, interpreted the themes through the four temperaments--melancholy, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric--that the ancient Greeks felt balanced the healthy body. These are moods that the orchestra is likely well acquainted with these days as well, it just having begun new contract negotiations. The playing was superb, and Ax, though reading from a score, offered compelling characterization of each mood.

Ironically, the “Symphonic Metamorphosis,” the perfect flashy piece for people who think they don’t like Hindemith, sounded less imaginative in these surroundings. Salonen led it as a generic 20th century blockbuster and the orchestra sparkled. The brass got a good workout and the players were impressive. The piece, when it was written in 1943, was a diversion from the wearying effect of the war years. Today it sends an audience home happy, telling us that however much we have to worry about in the 20th century, not all of its music need be worrisome. And that is, indeed, a subversive end to the season.