At Disney, a soaring tribute

Sometimes composers write for specific sites, sometimes not. But it is the rare composer of concert pieces who doesn’t ultimately wish that his or her music will cause the walls to come tumbling down.

That was even true Saturday night, when Esa-Pekka Salonen paid loving tribute to architect Frank Gehry in a new work, “Wing on Wing,” commissioned to celebrate the end of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first season in Walt Disney Concert Hall.

“Wing on Wing” -- which culminated the weekend events of the orchestra’s “Building Music,” a joint project of concerts and symposiums with the Getty Research Institute -- is music deep from the heart of the composer directed at the heart of the hall. The work contains writing of striking orchestral brilliance and uses the Disney space in ways that make its Douglas fir dance.

And shed a tear.

For all its cleverness and glitz, the 27-minute score is shot through with melancholy; it includes the most unabashedly beautiful and introspective music Salonen has written. In surprisingly emotional remarks to the audience, the composer explained that underlying his joy in Disney is a sadness that he doesn’t seem able to shake. Now that the impossible dream has been realized, how to move on to the next thing? And what could possibly top this?

Yet I heard “Wing on Wing” as more a love song to the Philharmonic than to the hall, maybe even a kind of farewell. Salonen has yet to make public his plans after his contract as music director with the orchestra expires in 2006.

But this is a piece, both devilishly difficult and inspiringly confident in its instrumental writing, that says to the Philharmonic -- “my guys,” Salonen affectionately called them in a pre-concert talk with composer John Adams -- not only that it has arrived but that the composer has arrived as well.

Still, there is no question about the impetus of “Wing on Wing.” It is pure Disney. The title comes from sailing lingo and refers to the positioning of sails being an inspiration for Gehry. But the sailboat metaphor also reminded Salonen of his own youth in Finland, by the sea and under the shadow of Sibelius, whose music often evokes stormy waters. Sibelian gusts whoosh through “Wing on Wing.”

There is also something of a 21st century Sibelius in the amber-colored opening measures, moody music for low strings and towering contrabass clarinet and contrabassoon. Sibelian, but also pure Disney: Bass frequencies absolutely glow in this hall.

A special element in “Wing on Wing” is the presence of two high sopranos (Jamie Chamberlin and Hila Plitmann) placed on either side of the orchestra and moving up to high terraces later in the piece. These seductive sirens (mermaids?) call to mind postmodern Wagnerian flower maidens as they intone intertwined wordless song and are especially poignant when they blend with woodwind choirs.

Gehry too makes an audio appearance in “Wing on Wing.” Salonen recorded the architect in conversation and uses words and phrases here and there, occasionally electronically distorted. To hear Gehry’s voice come in unexpectedly with a line like “All of a sudden I connect” can be touching. But too much of it verges on sentimentality. For me, having Gehry come in only at the end would have been more moving.

But Salonen uses electronics effectively when he suddenly wants to open up the sound, creating special spatial effects. Thinking about Gehry’s fish fetish in his early work, Salonen, with the help of electronics, evokes the mysterious call of the plainfin midshipman, a strange local fish, in midscore.

Of course, there are plenty of moments in the new piece that are sheer Salonen exuberance, characteristic wild rides that take advantage of the Philharmonic’s virtuosity. The rides never lose their thrills, and the one at the end of “Wing on Wing” is the best yet. But that final blowout also feels like a slight pulling back on Salonen’s part, almost as if he has exposed too much of himself and now has to put the armor back in place.

A question that immediately comes to mind is just how Disney-centric “Wing on Wing” is. After the performance, one out-of-town music professional insisted that the piece was a nonstarter and would never be performed effectively outside Disney. It might seem that way, but when music is this communicative, you can’t stop people from playing it.

Much of what preceded “Wing on Wing” in the “Building Music” programs was music, and talk about music, that was site-specific. The performances of Morton Feldman’s ethereal “Rothko Chapel” and Stravinsky’s “Canticum Sacrum” in Disney at the Green Umbrella Concert on Tuesday (and again Saturday afternoon) did a better job of reminding us that Disney is not the Rothko Chapel in Houston or St. Mark’s in Venice than of emphasizing what it is.

The former piece was intended for an almost neutral acoustic, the later for a reverberant one. But music is resilient and can translate from acoustic to acoustic if it’s done well. Unfortunately, both pieces, conducted by Bradley Lubman and featuring the Philharmonic’s New Music Group and the John Alexander Singers, were done poorly. The Stravinsky, difficult late music, was sloppy; the Feldman over-romanticized. The pieces were played with washed-out slides of the original venues projected on a screen in front of the Disney organ, as if to say, “Don’t you wish you were there?”

And as if to prove that site-specific music cannot be moved from here to there, the Tuesday and Saturday afternoon programs included Edgar Varese’s “Poeme Electronique,” tape music written to surround visitors to the famous Philips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Varese’s idea was to immerse the listener in futuristic electronic sounds; at Disney it was played from a single point -- a central array of speakers.

Even Henry Brant’s “Verticals Ascending,” written for two groups of instruments to be played at the Watts Towers in 1967, didn’t work in Disney. This outdoor music, with two distinct elements separated in space, blended into one big mess.

But the Getty proved that space can become the place in an all-Brant concert Friday night, this time terrifically well-conducted by Lubman. With the diminutive 91-year-old composer on hand in his trademark baseball cap and sweats to charm and amaze his listeners, the concert featured various examples of Brant’s spatial music.

For the new “Tremors,” Brant placed instruments all around the Harold M. Williams Auditorium. And with his slightly goofy bits for slightly goofy instruments, such as the bass saxophone and bass trombone, he turned the auditorium into the most fanciful spot in the entire Getty Center, at least for 17 minutes.

Brant won over his listeners through the force of personality exploiting architecture. So in another way did one speaker, multimedia artist Stephen Prina, who delivered a talk on architecture and music while a horn quintet played one of his scores.

At the other extreme, at Saturday night’s concert -- which also included a repeat of Liza Lim’s “Ecstatic Architecture,” premiered the previous week -- Salonen conducted Iannis Xenakis’ “Metastaseis,” written to the same mathematical model used for the architecture of the 1958 Philips Pavilion. In later work, the Greek composer translated mathematical impulses into uniquely powerful expression. Not here. This is one piece in which the walls not only stay firmly in place but the music sounds like unmoving surfaces.