A Mahler awakening at Disney

California!!!

First, the recall madness. On its heels, the glorious unveiling of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in eerie oven-hot temperatures. Finally, raging infernos unleashed with biblical ferocity. When have creation and destruction -- both on a historic scale -- last kept such abruptly close company?

As he long ago planned the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first season in Disney Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen no doubt gave the greatest weight to the musical allure of Mahler’s Second Symphony -- the “Resurrection” -- when he chose it to begin the orchestra’s regular concert series after last week’s exclusive galas. He had no way of knowing just how welcome, and appropriate, the idea of resurrection would prove Thursday night.

Written for a very large orchestra, soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, and chorus, the 80-minute symphony has a monumental scale. At its premiere in Berlin in 1895, the score produced -- in its rafter-raising, heaven-storming last pages -- what was probably the loudest, most spectacular music ever heard. And it offered a broader range of emotional experience, rising from the depths of despair to inspirational exultation, than any symphonic work had attempted.

If ceaseless suffering is inescapable on Earth, the angst-ridden young composer needed to believe, there has to be something beyond to give it meaning. That need was Mahler’s reason for converting from Judaism to Christianity (along with his desire to work in Hapsburg Vienna), and he wrote his Second Symphony as his symbolic and powerfully evocative journey from worldly death to spiritual rebirth.

In doing so, the composer overwhelmed audiences with an entirely new range of ravishing orchestral colors and a wealth of emotional experience many thought not proper for a concert hall. Mahler’s Second, in other words, is a perfect symphony for the democratic Disney Hall, where music is meant to be heard with an immediacy that one hopes will stun even the most sonically jaded modern listener, a hall where music might, one again hopes, raise our consciousness and lift our spirits.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if Salonen also programmed Mahler’s Second because he wanted the first thing that his regular audience heard in Disney Hall to be the sound of vibrating violins and violas cut through, as with an audible knife, by vehement cellos and basses. This is a symphony that was often performed in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and it always required the string players to push themselves beyond their limits to make much impact. Thursday, the drama was riveting, the force of that ferocious rising bass line pinning at least one listener to his flower-patterned seat.

Every so often in the opening passage, bassoons and contrabassoons join in the cellos’ grim march. The change of orchestration is less to be noticed than subconsciously felt -- which means it was inaudible in the Chandler unless crudely overstated. In Disney, this small detail -- the low, buzzing sound of rapacious death -- was but one of thousands of other instrumental details that subtly, and not so subtly, enhanced the drama.

In the last movement, God and the devil fight a titanic battle. Trumpets, horns and timpani, divided between groups on stage and others in the far distance, describe the action. In the Chandler, in which the orchestra felt as though it were playing in another room, the effect was of music offstage and off-offstage. In Disney, where the spatial nature of sound is more precise and vivid than in any other concert hall in my experience, the impact was magnificent.

The playing was ardent and exceptionally impressive. The brass have taken on a new security in Disney. Like the new generation of television and computer monitors, the winds already have a much-expanded, high-definition color. The Master Chorale, making its contribution to the last movement, sounded liberated. The resonant mezzo-soprano Monica Groop’s solo in the fourth movement, Mahler’s lifting of a soul in pain into heavenly light, effortlessly filled the auditorium. In the Finale, soprano Christiane Oelze soared, as if electrified.

Salonen easily commands Mahler’s sprawling score, and he clearly enjoyed himself showing off Disney’s strengths. The dynamic contrasts were particularly noteworthy. When Mahler wanted soft playing, Salonen urged strings to remain on the edge of audibility. Disney handled the great climax at the end -- when the brass blare, the chorus and solo singers sail on wings of ecstasy -- with ease. The volume of sound was loud, hair-raisingly so, but there was never a threat of distortion.

And yet there was, for this listener, the slightest letdown at the end. It might have reflected a taste, after years of hearing this symphony at the Chandler, for having the brass blow their collective brains out and the cellos and basses reach near apoplexy as intrepid musicians try to surmount inadequate acoustics.

No one could be accused of holding back on this occasion, but there was a sense of Salonen and the players not wanting to go too far in such an exposed environment. Like a new high-performance car with an excess of horsepower, Disney clearly (and wisely) makes its drivers initially cautious.

That’s not likely to last for long, though, once they get a taste for power.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave.

When: Tonight at 8, Sunday at 2 p.m.

Price: $35-$120

Contact: (323) 850-2000