Bjork’s Land of Fire and Ice

The Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion has had its share of Scandinavian moments since Esa-Pekka Salonen took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but it’s never seen anything quite like Bjork.

The singer opened her concert Monday silently, sitting like a statue under a shower of falling leaves. At the end she was twirling around the stage singing a cheery new song called “It’s in Our Hands,” looking and sounding like something out of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” ride.

Of course, this doggedly distinctive artist is not from Salonen’s Finland, but from Iceland, the Scandinavian outpost whose remoteness encourages an anything-goes, avant-garde sensibility. That was the primary color in Sugarcubes, the anarchic rock band that brought Bjork to the pop world’s attention in the late ‘80s.

In her subsequent solo career, though, she has engineered a remarkable transformation, retaining her essential quirkiness while shedding the baggage of oddball novelty to become one of the most respected figures on the pop landscape.

Moving beyond that niche, she received a best song Oscar nomination for “I’ve Seen It All,” from “Dancer in the Dark,” a film for which she also won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

Her sixth solo album, “Vespertine,” offers modest refinements on her craft, but Monday’s ambitious concert marked a more memorable step in her progress.

With a choir of 11 women from Greenland on stage and a full orchestra down in the pit, Bjork was like a kid set loose in a toy store, and the intensity of her pleasure in the music was picked up and fed back by her audience.

It was the kind of bond you see with a band such as Radiohead, one based on a mutual respect and a permission for risk-taking. The sweeping introspection of Bjork’s music makes it enigmatic and demanding, but she goes where she must in her quest for a purity of expression.

That doesn’t mean it was stiff-upper-lip time at the pavilion. In fact, Bjork’s humor, exuberance and woman-child persona added up to an engaging and lively performance.

She wore the swan dress that caught everyone’s attention at the Oscars for the first half of the show, and then a red number that looked like a wind chime atop a flamingo and provided tinkling percussion when she shook her shoulders.

Her music blends currents from dance music with atmospheric orchestrations, and she had the San Francisco duo Matmos (which also opened the show) manning the computer lab at stage right.

The set--a career overview that featured six songs from “Vespertine”--included separate turns with them and with harpist and keyboardist Zeena Parkins. In every setting, her voice cut through with power and summoned intimacy.

The show built to a thumping climax, with the dance beats doubling in tempo and intensifying in volume, and the sprite at the center being radiant and serene, confident that it’s a Bjork world after all.