Conlon makes a passionate argument for Schulhoff

James Conlon led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a triumphant three-part program Friday at Walt Disney Concert Hall. As part of the important “Silenced Voices” project -- music by composers who perished in the Holocaust -- Conlon opened with Erwin Schulhoff’s Jazz Suite for Orchestra, went on to lead Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Concerto and closed with Dvorak’s brooding Seventh Symphony.

In remarks from the stage, the conductor told the audience that in the ‘20s, Schulhoff was regarded as “one of the naughty boys” of music. Long before John Cage, he wrote a piece consisting entirely of silence -- but with the score containing intricate rhythmic changes and detailed interpretive directions.

Like Gershwin -- but, again, before him -- Schulhoff brought jazz into European concert music. Composed in 1921 and originally called “Suite in the new style,” the Jazz Suite is a jewel of that period. In the ‘30s, however, with the rise of Nazism, Schulhoff turned toward communism, writing symphonies that expressed Marxist ideals of an oppressed working class triumphing over capitalist overlords.

Though living in Prague, capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, the composer became a Soviet citizen in 1939, a move that protected him as long as Hitler’s nonaggression pact with Stalin remained intact. After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia later that year, however, he was arrested and sent to a Bavarian fortress, where he died in 1942.

An advocate of the irrational, sometimes sublime Dada movement, Schulhoff prefaced the Jazz Suite score with a strange, eruptive poem, which Conlon read aloud. It contains such angry and fantastic lines as “I will eat you all, Into the sausage machine with you, Band of Pigs!!!” and “Comes the moment in the Cosmos, When I will be transformed in BAYER Aspirin.” But it also includes this resonant insight: “Wicked people have no songs, As you will see.”

Still, anyone expecting the Jazz Suite to have catchy songs a la Gershwin was in for a surprise. The fascinating six-movement suite consists of abstract distillations of jazz rhythms and forms, rendered in fractured, fragmentary orchestrations that make brilliant use of instrumental tone colors. Think Webern, not Gershwin or Poulenc. The fifth movement, “Step,” was played entirely by five expert percussionists.

American pianist Jonathan Biss, 23, made his arresting Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Mendelssohn’s D-minor Concerto. Tall, bespectacled, lanky and somewhat awkward, Biss sat at the piano rocking nervously until his entrance, then commanded the keyboard with amazingly quiet, velvety evenness.

He rejected all opportunities to grandstand, to turn the music into a vehicle for his considerable virtuosity. The orchestra might rage around him, but Biss was the calm yet still intensely expressive center of the storm. But make no mistake. Biss reached an authentic core that communicated integrity and authenticity. The audience quite rightly gave him a huge ovation.

But even more warmly did the listeners applaud Conlon after an impassioned reading of Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony. Dark and mysterious, lyrical and direct, the symphony remains rooted in its minor key despite endless momentary slips into major, until finally it explodes into a fierce assertion of the major key. The Philharmonic played fabulously. Conlon was a joy.