Thrills aplenty from L.A. Philharmonic

Returning to the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic this week, guest conductor Ivan Fischer coaxed a willing orchestra into splendid and colorful performances of an unhackneyed program. Thursday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Hungarian musician caused thrills aplenty; appropriately, the audience rose to its feet more than once.

The program began with a first Philharmonic performance of Dohnanyi’s set of character pieces, “Symphonic Minutes,” and ended with one of the orchestra’s signatures, Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8 in G. Both benefited from the conductor’s unflagging sense of linear thrust, the ensemble’s focused virtuosity and its wide range of colors.

In the great G-major symphony, all the solo lines contributed mightily to a satisfying performance, but none more beguilingly than the cello section’s extended moment in the limelight near the beginning of the finale. One of the reasons for the standing ovation at the end of the piece was Fischer’s careful delineation of the many contrasts in that finale: The soft playing was exquisite and the climaxes hair-raising.

But the core of the program proved most admirable. With the sensitive and exhilarating collaboration of Fischer and the orchestra, American pianist Garrick Ohlsson gave a definitive, spectacular and deeply probing reading to Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, the greatest and in some ways most daunting of the composer’s concertos.

With myriad gradations of color, touch and dynamics, Ohlsson produced the full spectrum of emotional devices built into this masterpiece. His range extended from the silken delicacy of a Walter Gieseking to the steely power of an Alexander Toradze, with all the colors in between, and all applied with a bracing artistic astuteness.