Zacharias Treats Mozart, Haydn as Worlds to Be Discovered

Continuing the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s six-concert, three-program mini-festival called “Mozart and Friends,” conductor and pianist Christian Zacharias added more pungency and stylishness Wednesday night to the series he began last week.

He led the orchestra in two familiar but eminently rethinkable Haydn symphonies; then, at mid-program in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he conducted Mozart’s C-minor Piano Concerto, K. 491, from the keyboard.

The entire performance was a tonic and a celebration. The orchestra, under Zacharias’ exacting leadership, achieved clean lines, breathtaking contrasts, the happiest balance of enthusiasm and control.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 83, “La Poule” (The Hen), moved along with the speed of a story well told, its many details familiar yet surprising. Each movement had character and color in contrast to the others, and each glowed with spontaneity.

Symphony No. 103, the “Drum Roll,” told more musical tales, and engrossingly. Emotional imagination and a tight grip on form is what Zacharias offers to these pieces; the results on this occasion proved irresistible.

The best came in between the symphonies, when Zacharias played Mozart’s most seraphic and most dramatic piano concerto, No. 24.

Here, the pianist unveiled in the Andante beauties that seemed newly wrought, accidentally discovered, and in the outer movements, an inexorable narrative, an unending fable unwinding before the rapt listener. With his purling passage-work, angelic trills and an edgeless, singing tone that combines steel with velvet, Zacharias is the most convincing of Mozarteans.

*

* The L.A. Philharmonic repeats this program Sunday afternoon at 2:30 in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $10-$70. (323) 850-2000. Jeffrey Kahane leads a different “Mozart and Friends” program tonight at 8.