A salute to Salonen

Twenty years ago a little-known, relatively inexperienced young Finnish composer and musician conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The first impression by one violist in the orchestra, seeing him standing, self-effacingly, backstage, was: Hmm, things are looking up around here. A cute new stagehand.

She was, in a way, right.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, who celebrated the 20th anniversary of his Philharmonic debut this weekend, has been a kind of super stage hand. We can credit him with handing us stages, with having had a lot to do with making the stage of the Walt Disney Concert Hall possible, with having had a lot to do with putting Los Angeles artistically on the world musical stage in a way it had never been before.

Salonen is now a celebrity and clearly can have no doubt about his worth, but he still charms with his self-effacement. The anniversary Philharmonic concert Friday night at Disney Hall came with a tribute video, in which the violist Dale Hikawa Silverman got laughs for her irreverent reminiscence. And the evening opened with a tribute by Steven Stuckey -- a clever 90-second fanfare, “Allegro Salonenesco,” conducted by the composer.

But Salonen, who has led the Philharmonic every year since his debut and been music director since 1992, was all business. The program was not one of the more adventurous ones for which he is known, particularly by envious out-of-towners. Indeed, it was about as pot-boilerish as Salonen gets. It began with Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka.” After intermission Alexander Toradze was soloist in, of all things seemingly un-Salonenesque, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.

Nonetheless, it was a terrific concert, the kind where old music sounded new, where sounds were delivered from musician to listener as gifts, where you wanted nothing to end (not even the Rachmaninoff!), where everything you heard made you feel more alive.

There will be other occasions to dwell on how spectacularly Salonen has grown since 1984, maybe sooner than we want. The one dark cloud over Disney on Friday was the fact that the orchestra did not use this special occasion to announce that Salonen will extend his contract, which ends after next season, fueling suspicion that he may not stay.

One never knows what is going on in the minds of symphony orchestra musicians (once after an especially inspired performance by a guest conductor, a colleague told me he overheard a couple of Philharmonic old-timers in the parking lot complain that the conductor was the same jerk he’d always been). But it was hard not to hear this concert as a love fest. Debussy’s “Faun” was sheer sonic cashmere, Janet Ferguson’s flute solos especially supple and captivating. “Petrushka” is a Salonen specialty, but here he found fresh ways to grab the ear. It was as if every member in the orchestra had something to say, each was going to be the magician who brings life into Stravinsky’s puppet.

Toradze was soloist with Salonen at his Philharmonic debut 20 years ago, and he was a wild player then. He is 10 times wilder today. He didn’t so much play Rachmaninoff as hunt Rachmaninoff, and the piano was his gunship. If a soloist could play jazz and a killer concerto exactly as written at the same time, he would play it the way Toradze did the Rach 3 Friday night, stomping, attacking and drifting off dreamily into eternal space.

Salonen avoided the kind of male-bonding approach to accompanying Toradze that Valery Gergiev assumes. He maintained order, while still clearing space for a messy soloist. It worked perfectly. Toradze thrilled. But so did the pristine sonorities that arose from the orchestra.

If you could bottle the sense of exhilaration that percolated all evening throughout the full Disney house Friday night, you could make a fortune.