With Salonen, There’s Magic in the Air

A young man’s anxiety resolved by an older man’s hard-won wisdom framed the Los Angeles Philharmonic program led by Esa-Pekka Salonen on Thursday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Between the two points, Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter made a luminous Los Angeles debut in works by Ravel and four Scandinavian composers.

Salonen introduced Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, which opened the program, with engaging, insightful remarks from the stage. He said not one word about 12-tone technique but rather emphasized how he heard the piece as “very neurotic music” that embodied the personal and societal fears of the time it was composed--1914, the year war broke out in Europe.

Salonen then led a committed, concentrated performance of Berg’s moody, sometimes sweet but eventually frightening music, keeping conflicting foreground and background events in exquisite balance. He returned to the stage twice for curtain calls.

The compacted and important issues Berg raised remained suspended until Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, which closed the program. Under Salonen’s direction, Sibelius’ last symphony emerged as an austere epic of heroic courage and stoicism, a call for unglamorous and likely unrewarded strength of character--in essence a purging of individual neurotic obsession.

Salonen was not interested in details at the expense of continuity and flow. The dark, ominous opening, for instance, blossomed as one long arc into the great trombone theme played with heart by Ralph Sauer and his supportive colleagues. At that moment, it became clear, if there had been any doubt, why the composer was declared a national--and now international--treasure.

There was only a single climax before the absolutely magical final liftoff that depicted unexpected but earned transcendence.

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The geographical pendulum had already swung subtly north with a group of five modest, appealing art songs by Wilhelm Stenhammar, Sibelius, Alfven and Grieg sung by Von Otter. But it was Ravel’s three-part “Sheherazade” song cycle that allowed her most to exploit her limpid and light mezzo (she could pass as a soprano) in subtle, intimate word painting.

Salonen bathed her in delicate or surging accompaniment that showed why Ravel never wrote a wasted or extraneous note. Anne Diener Zentner played the lovely flute solos in the middle song.

Von Otter sang the folk-dance-like “Aspakerspolska” by W. Peterson-Berger as her single encore.

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* The program will be repeated Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. $10 to $70. (213) 850-2000.