All the elements in harmony

Guest conductor David Zinman made it look easy at a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The music flowed, the orchestra sounded gorgeous, the composers seemed to be speaking directly without any interference. There are no pros like the seasoned pros.

That includes Richard Goode, the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor, the centerpiece of the three-part program. Goode’s interpretation, far from being a one-versus-the-many struggle, offered a more integrated picture. No tortured psyche, no fussy shading here. Rather a calm but intense center from which he spun out fluent, full-length lines that laid open the music’s architecture and inspired matching phrases in the orchestra. It was admirable.

Goode played a cadenza by Beethoven in the first movement and one of his own in the last. Beethoven’s, wonderful as it is, sounded like Beethoven. Goode’s sounded like Mozart.

Zinman accompanied with a brilliant sense of balance, tension and line, and without micro-managing the music.

These virtues also distinguished his loving reading of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, which closed the program. He had ideas in every bar, ideas about how to initiate and terminate a phrase, where an extra zing makes the difference between life and routine, where a sudden shift in dynamic makes your breath stop.

For all that, the orchestra sounded free to play. The expressive soloists included William Lane, horn; Lorin Levee, clarinet; and Marion Kuszyk, oboe.

The program opened with the Los Angeles premiere of Gerald Levinson’s “Five Fires,” a bright and percussive 10-minute piece based on Balinese five-note scales that achieves an unexpected serenity at the end.

The arresting “honking” sounds, imitative of Indonesian wind instruments, resulted from the clarinets and oboes being played “bells up,” or tips facing forward toward the audience instead of down as usual toward the musicians’ laps. The composer was on hand to acknowledge the respectful applause.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Today, 8 p.m.

Price: $14 to $82.

Info: (323) 850-2000