Maestro and Orchestra, Happily Together Again

Esa-Pekka Salonen has returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He may occasionally have interrupted his sabbatical from conducting, such as when he opened the first two weeks of the orchestra’s season in October. But he did manage to spend a year living the life of a full-time composer, and the bit of conducting he did in New York and Europe last year was mainly a composer conducting his own music.

Now back as music director, some things have changed. He has reordered his priorities. With a new large piano piece, cello concerto and choral piece under his belt, he now has commissions for an orchestral work, a piano concerto and an opera facing him, and he has spoken of a resolve to achieve a workable balance between performing music and making it. Moreover, Salonen rejoins a slightly different orchestra. His time off coincided with the first year of a new Philharmonic administration under Deborah Borda. And the Philharmonic has new players, including the new principal cellist, Andrew Shulman, whose influence on the string section is beginning to make itself heard.

The Chinese have a saying that after a month away from his family, a lucky husband feels like he gets a new wife. At Saturday night’s performance in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, there was some evidence of just such recaptured freshness and perhaps a slight caution. Orchestras are not, of course, families (despite how often they are described as dysfunctional ones every time something goes wrong), and they are well accustomed to promiscuity, playing for many different conductors during a season. But they are human, and the dynamic between a music director and some 100 musician egos is an intricate and intimate one that requires complex adjustments between personality and professionalism.

For his first program back, Salonen carefully put the emphasis on professionalism, choosing two classically made symphonies--Haydn’s 99th and Bruckner’s Seventh. Both are orchestral statements about the orchestra, Haydn’s on a relatively small scale--relative, that is, to Bruckner’s quite large one. Both are works that believe a symphony has nothing to prove but itself, that it is enough to invent some likable musical themes and then find a structure in which to contain them as they grow, divide and interact. They follow the same format, with four of the same kinds of movements structured identically. And the performing requirements are similar in both cases--if the details are clearly focused, if the rhythms are precisely articulated, if the phrases are carefully sculpted, if the orchestra is well balanced and in tune, the music will be understood and effective, however widely interpretations vary.

And Salonen, not just getting back to conducting but also getting back to basics, demonstrated an essential respect for the classicism of both composers. His Haydn was bounding yet constrained. A moderate-sized orchestra was asked to play very cleanly, approximating the sound of a period-instrument band, but still retaining the weight of a modern orchestra that must speak in a 3,000-seat hall. When Haydn experimented with something that seems almost modern to us, such as the Stravinskyan metrical irregularities in the Menuetto, Salonen pointed that out. And he seemed particularly at home in the propulsive, peppery Finale.

Bruckner’s Seventh starts with the gentlest buzz in the violins and a lavish, swooping melody rising out of the cellos and the horns. And the Philharmonic began it magnificently--the violins were sheer gossamer; the cellos, brilliantly powerful. For 65 minutes, the symphony then goes on to design a musical fortress out of that sonic cotton and cement, and Salonen constructed his realization with scrupulously shaped phrases, eagerly launched rhythms and a general basking in the immense sound of Bruckner’s brass.

The playing was not, on this occasion, perfect; brass and woodwind were more impressive as individuals than collectively. But the strings are now a Philharmonic glory, newly weighted on the bottom, as elegant and incisive as ever on top. And given the sense of trust in the music that came through in Saturday’s concert, the overall impression of the orchestra was that of spirits lifted. Concert seasons don’t usually coincide with the calendar, but it is clearly a new year for the Philharmonic.