80 Candles

Isaac Stern’s 80th birthday has not been easy on either the famed violinist or the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Around a month after Stern’s July birthday--which was the theme of the Philharmonic’s opening night gala Thursday--he underwent heart surgery. Irrepressible as ever, he planned to travel to Los Angeles anyway. But his doctors ordered otherwise. The Philharmonic was left with a last-minute scramble for replacements. And the reports from a recent Carnegie Hall Stern tribute were that the violinist looked frail.

The good news from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, however, was that the Philharmonic’s scramble was generally successful and that Stern, who addressed the audience by video, appeared surprisingly robust on the screen and sounded downright chipper. More good news is that Esa-Pekka Salonen is back, if only for a brief break in his yearlong sabbatical (he conducts concerts this weekend and next), and the Philharmonic was also back to sounding its excellent old self.

Gala concerts, which serve to benefit the orchestra, are always delicate balancing acts. A party atmosphere prevails--in this instance, there was champagne and a silent auction before the concert and dinner after for the highest-paying, formally attired guests. A too serious concert may not be taken seriously enough by such a festive crowd, yet something special is needed as a draw. Household names are wanted, but often they are seasoned performers whose age makes them more subject to cancellation.

(octogenarian Ravi Shanker’s illness forced cancellation of the Philharmonic pension fund benefit in the spring). You can’t have Yo-Yo Ma play the Dvorak Cello Concerto every year.

Stern, however, comes with a few guarantees. He is mentor and friend to any number of noted younger players who are devoted to him. On this occasion, violinist Gil Shaham hopped on a plane from Europe, where he is in the midst of a recording session, and pianist Yefim Bronfman took an evening’s break from a sabbatical. The program was devised as an artful entertainment, the kind that was once popular (a hundred years ago or more) when classical concerts weren’t invariably sanctimonious. A stunning wall of white roses on the stage lip separated audience from orchestra.

But perhaps the nicest touch was the surprise opening of the program with Stravinsky’s “Greeting Prelude,” a spiky arrangement of “Happy Birthday” written for the 80th-birthday of the conductor Pierre Monteux, with whom Stern happened to make his professional debut in San Francisco in 1937. Here, it served as not only one I.S. tribute to another I.S. but also a preview of the season, which will feature a Stravinsky festival under Salonen in the spring. In what has been a sometimes dispiriting year without the orchestra’s music director, it offered maybe the freshest 50 seconds of playing we had heard all year.

Freshness, in fact, was the hallmark of both Salonen and Bronfman. They offered the second and third movements from Saint-Saens’ Second Piano Concerto with an irresistible sparkle. Bronfman, in particular, created an extraordinary, near surrealistic effect with his sequences of trills in the last movement. Shaham’s participation with the orchestra came in the first movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto, and he brought to it his characteristic high gloss and cheerfulness. To give him the benefit of the doubt, his newly acquired affectations in the movement--slash-and-burn fast playing regularly contrasted with silvery, thin-toned, navel-gazing lyric passages--may simply have been a nod to the variety-show nature of the evening. In a short Mozart sonata for piano and violin (K. 304 in E minor), both Bronfman and Shaham felt the need to wring drama from the first movement but offered wonderfully sensitive playing in the slow, minuet Finale.

Stern, on the other hand, has always stood for a kind of clean, exciting all-American straightforward quality of playing--aggressive, perhaps, but never pretentious. And, curiously, the evening’s greatest tribute to him may have been from the orchestra, with which he first played in 1937, and which ended the evening with a spectacular performance of Ravel’s “Bolero”--spectacular because Salonen approached it with a sense of purity, letting the showiness take care of itself. The wind solos were exceptional, from player after player, in fineness of line and dynamic. Raynor Carroll heroically kept the snare drum tattoo.

The fact that a careful “Bolero”--one that puts its trust in the sound of the orchestra--turns out to be the most glamorous way to play it, was also interestingly mirrored in one other aspect of the evening. A scripted celebrity host, Leonard Nimoy, proved no competition to the extemporaneous Salonen and Managing Director Deborah Borda, both of whom told humorous Stern stories with their superb musicians’ sense of comic timing. The lesson of the evening: trust the orchestra.