Adams permeates the evening

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first Green Umbrella concert of the season took place Saturday night at Royce Hall -- which was unusual -- and revolved around the music and influence of John Adams -- which was not, given his omnipresence in concert halls and in the press.

If there is one guiding principle that animates Adams, it is the credo, use everything. It didn’t start with him, but he seems to be the embodiment of that spirit in our time, one that doesn’t place a value judgment on whether an influence came from Beethoven, Duke Ellington or a television cartoon. What matters is how it is used, whether it works and how the composer expresses it through his or her unique personality.

That spirit has been thoroughly absorbed by Derek Bermel in his 1998 clarinet concerto “Voices,” which Adams conducted with evident relish while Bermel handled the solo part. But Bermel’s piece often goes beyond the boundaries of taste in his zeal to throw in everything he’s absorbed and gets trapped in a quicksand of dead-end effects and banal pop.

The first movement became a wearisome slapstick shouting match between the streetwise clarinet and the jeering orchestra, and the piece concluded with an arch, elephantine attempt to fuse funk and big-band jazz with a symphony orchestra.

After intermission, Esa-Pekka Salonen emerged to take charge of Adams’ massive culminating symphonic work of the 1990s, “Naive and Sentimental Music,” which stands as a mid-career summary of the composer’s now-extravagant orchestral manner. It was illuminating to hear the work again in the Royce acoustics (it was premiered by Salonen and the Philharmonic at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in February 1999), with newly revealed details in needle-sharp relief, the chugging climaxes gathering with greater cumulative force and logic.

The other Adams work on the program, “Hallelujah Junction,” for two pianos, was written in the late ‘90s. In some ways, it is a throwback to early Adams, with its phasing Minimalist grooves, interrupted by an unabashedly Romantic Rachmaninoff-tinged interlude in the center, concluding with a shouting, stabbing hallelujah chorus of sorts. Pianists Grant Gershon and Gloria Cheng, for whom the piece was written, did the honors.