L.A. Philharmonic pulls out the stops in opener

It may not have seemed fortuitous last year at this time that, when world attention focused on the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, one of its most striking features, the organ, was not yet in operation. Tuning the hulking great instrument has been laborious. From midnight to dawn since the Disney doors opened, its Dr. Frankenstein, Manuel Rosales, spent most nights individually voicing each of the 6,143 pipes.

Strange sounds often emanated from those tuning sessions, the orchestra’s president, Deborah Borda, noted Saturday night in a discussion with Rosales before the Philharmonic’s first subscription concert of its second season in Disney. “Yes, and many of them were from my mouth,” Rosales explained.

But when the organ came to stupendous life in both a gala concert Friday night that also featured six grand pianos and then on Saturday’s program of works for organ and orchestra, no one could doubt that a star has been born. On Saturday, Todd Wilson, the organist both nights, began the evening with a solo, Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor (yes, the one from “Fantasia”), and with the first imposing notes a gasp came from the sold-out house.

In fact, the Philharmonic has been canny in its tantalizing, striptease-like unveiling of the organ. The official inaugural, Thursday, was a relatively low-key solo recital, a gradual revelation of the instrument’s potential. Friday night’s gala featured the organ only at the beginning, in Richard Strauss’ garish “Festival Prelude,” and then went on to find other ways of being gaudy in a program for multiple pianos. Saturday, the real start of the season, was just about all organ, all the time. It included Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ and Saint-Saens’ “Organ” Symphony. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted both nights.

The Friday gala, “Grands on Grand,” was basically goofy. Realizing that there could be no possible way to reproduce the international buzz from the gala concerts that opened Disney last year, the orchestra decided to have fun instead, fanning six Steinway grands on stage in front of the orchestra and playing silly music.

First, though, came Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos, with three star soloists -- Yefim Bronfman, Emanuel Ax and Helene Grimaud. Even this proved a bit of a goof. The concerto is early Mozart in a galant style. Three fortepianos, the pellucid, fragile-sounding keyboard instrument for which Mozart wrote, can sound charmingly celestial. Three grands make quite a clang. But a sense of humor pervaded, and the slow movement was played with the delicate daintiness of tiptoeing elephants.

After intermission, Gloria Cheng, Joanne Pearce Martin and Shai Wosner joined the keyboard roster for “Hexameron,” a competition that Liszt devised for six pianist composers. Each wrote a variation on a theme from Bellini’s opera “I Puritani,” and Liszt put them together in a piece for six pianos and orchestra. The original idea was that all six would perform, but it never happened, and the score was never fully orchestrated (Robert Linn finished it for Liszt in 1963, 125 years later).

The real rivalry was between Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg. Thalberg wrote the flashiest variation, and Bronfman played it with fabulous flair, although all six pianists were in good humor and good form. Morton Gould’s arrangement of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for six pianos and orchestra doesn’t even come close to being worth the effort other than as an acoustic test for Disney. In that it was great -- you could pick out the individual pianos even when they all clattered at once.

But then there is that organ. For all the attention it got Saturday, the striptease hasn’t ended. Part of the reason is unfortunate. Wilson, a Cleveland organist, certainly likes to make a splash. But he is a heavy-handed player. His Bach at the beginning of Saturday’s program was all about thick, loud sound. Salonen followed that with Leopold Stokowski’s orchestration of Bach’s “Little” Fugue in G minor, and for a moment the organ was overshadowed not only by the carefully graded instrumental colors, but, more importantly, by Salonen’s ability to meaningfully bring out the inner lines.

Harrison’s concerto is for organ and eight percussionists, and it was written in 1972 when Harrison was overwhelmed by two commissions -- one for organ, one for percussion -- so he simply put the two together. Given the Philharmonic’s historic lack of interest in one of California’s most distinctive and important composers, there could be little argument with the gesture of programming a major Harrison score.

It didn’t, however, come off. The concerto, in five movements, begins and ends with a burst of percussive energy but has a serene center. The percussionists were fine, and Salonen kept the performance together.

But Wilson’s rhythmically tense, unidiomatic reading proved grating and overpowering. Recent performances of the work by the San Francisco Symphony have proved that the concerto can, in fact, be a joyous occasion.

Even in the Saint-Saens symphony, where the organ gets to overpower as much as it wants, Wilson added just a hint of sluggishness to what was otherwise a terrific performance from the orchestra. Salonen conducted with exciting sense of detail that breathed new life into a dated symphony.

Still, when the organ opened up at the end, few, I think, cared what the orchestra was up to or whether Wilson was an interesting player. It was a blast of ecstatic sound that spoke for itself.

But my sense is that we still haven’t heard what this new organ can really do. A star is definitely born. And time’s come to remove the final veil. Maybe this week.