Salonen plays up the drama of Shostakovich’s ominous Sixth

“What does it mean?” one member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic audience was heard asking after Esa-Pekka Salonen finished conducting a striking, important performance of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony on Wednesday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It’s an excellent question.

What it doesn’t mean is actually a lot easier to answer. Although claiming to express the moods of “spring, joy, youth, lyricism,” Shostakovich began with a slow and bleak 20-minute first movement. Next comes a short and sarcastic dance movement, and finally a brisk, ferocious march that concludes the symphony with a vulgar flourish of show business. The year was 1939, and in Comrade Stalin’s Soviet Union, all was wrong with the world.

In recordings by Yvgeny Mvravinsky, who premiered the work with the Leningrad Philharmonic, you sense the immediate drama of the times, of the rush to war. Leonard Bernstein, in his late, perversely drawn-out but overpowering performances, treated the Sixth as if it revealed life to be an enormous cosmic joke.

Under Salonen there are new things to be heard. Bringing out all that is momentous and lonely in the first movement, he put Shostakovich’s startling solos -- the piercing distant scream of a piccolo, the haunting lament of the horn, the deathly, distant trumpets, the eerie glow of the celesta -- under a cold, but clearly illuminating light.

The thrusting drama he then brought to the two shorter movements proved extraordinarily compelling. He made it seem as though Shostakovich was saying that we’d suffered all we could bear, and as he watched war fever spread, it was time for grotesque celebration, a chilling but irresistible dance of death.

Context meant a great deal to this performance. Saving the Fourth and Fifth for later in the season, Salonen has leapt forward in his five-year Shostakovich “plan,” which began with the first three symphonies last season, all of which are full of genuine youthful enthusiasm and Leninist optimism. This Shostakovich, a decade later, having withstood Stalin’s withering criticism, is not broken, but no longer whole.

But more immediate in making that point was the contrast with the music of the first half of Wednesday’s concert, which included Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17, K. 453, music that tells us all is right with the world.

Mozart’s concerto was written by a 28-year-old composer brimming with life, fresh ideas flowing from a inexhaustible creative source. Peter Serkin was the elegantly fluid soloist, and at times in his lovely performance, Mozart almost seemed to be playing the pianist rather than the other way around.

In the opening orchestral tutti, for instance, Serkin silently played along with the orchestra, his fingers touching the keys as lightly as a feather. When the piano sound finally arrived with the first solo passage, it was as graceful and natural as a bird taking flight.

Also right with the world was Ravel’s loving tribute to Couperin and, more important, to French music, which Salonen conducted as burbling, refreshing chamber music, the Philharmonic winds in exquisite shape.

Indeed, the Philharmonic, all around, is in excellent shape. Some Russian members have become vocal critics of their music director in their native repertory -- to judge from the accents of the anonymous phone calls to The Times -- but say this for them and for Salonen, they give him all the brilliance he asks for.

On their own, four Philharmonic string players offered a bland, if well-played pre-concert performance of Shostakovich’s Sixth String Quartet, a reading pleasant enough on the surface but that made little impact amid the comings and goings in the Grand Hall.

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The Los Angeles Philharmonic repeats this program at 8 tonight, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. $14-$82. (323) 850-2000.