At Disney Hall, the beast is released

The Walt Disney Concert Hall organ, famous a year for being seen but not heard, has struck many who have finally heard it for the first time since its inauguration last week as a sleeping beauty or beast or hulking giant come to life. It is indeed hard, if not downright humorless, to think otherwise, so visceral are the instrument’s sounds in this acoustically vibrant space.

The creature certainly breathes and bellows in James MacMillan’s “A Scotch Bestiary,” a sonically spectacular concerto for organ and orchestra commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to celebrate the organ’s inauguration and given its premiere Thursday night. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted. Wayne Marshall was the spine-tingling soloist. The BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, England, where Marshall is based, is a co-commissioner.

Sincere, serious, a Scottish nationalist and devout Roman Catholic, MacMillan is well known for his stunning music of passionate religious and political intent. What higher calling, then, for the Disney organ’s apocalyptic breath and bellow.

But not this time. The sense of whimsy inspired by the sight of pickup-sticks organ pipes bursting forth behind the stage led MacMillan through a stage of mental associations: Disney, cartoons, the Warner Bros. classics, their daffy Carl Stalling soundtracks.

What MacMillan has come up with is a two-part, quirkily animated concerto. His bumptious bestiary is just that, a musical book of fanciful animals impersonated by organ and orchestra. In the first part, he introduces “a cro-magnon hyena” and the “red-handed, no surrender, howler monkey,” as well as buzzing bees, lumbering reptiles, the cuckoo. In the second part, he lets them loose.

The animals, MacMillan explained in remarks to Salonen before the performance, are caricatures of specific Scots, but the types are universal. His parodies include Scottish patriots, with their stuttering hot-air fanfares and shameless self-important vamping, and we all know that archetype this political season.

In all fairness, not everyone will find in “A Scottish Bestiary,” which is subtitled “Enigmatic variations on a zoological carnival at a Caledonian exhibition,” the joy of the organ. There was one loud boo Thursday the second the performance ended. The expectations set up by allusions to Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (there is a kind of promenade theme as pages are turned in the first part), Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” (which was also based on people the composer knew) and Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals” are strong. And although MacMillan is no less colorful in writing descriptive music than his predecessors, he is more aggressive in his sound.

This can be music, particularly in the second part, as an unmanageable menagerie, MacMillan seeming at times almost a Scottish Ives. But what sounds he gets from both orchestra and organ! And with Marshall, we finally get an organist with big-time flair and technique. To hear the organ buzz, roar, howl as fingers fly over the five keyboards, to have one’s ears seduced and trampled by this musical monster, an ever-transmogrifying musical trickster, is an experience not to be found anywhere else. But just in case that isn’t enough, MacMillan has a fantastical battery of percussion as well.

The program opened and closed with Richard Strauss, two pieces for organ and orchestra. It is hard to believe that the Festival Prelude, pompous music to inaugurate a Viennese organ in 1913, and “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” written 17 years earlier, are by the same composer. The Festival Prelude, which was also played at the Philharmonic’s gala last week, has the one advantage of being extra-loud, so you get to listen through feet, fingers and backside as the whole hall vibrates to organ climaxes.

“Zarathustra,” on the other hand, provided the real reason the organ was built. No one knew it would look like that when it was initially proposed or that organ recitals would become the attraction that surely they now will be in Disney. But the Philharmonic knew it needed something better than the electronic joke it used in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion when it played pieces like “Zarathustra,” with its famous “2001” opening.

The low rumble at the beginning, which nothing electronic could possibly simulate, was justification enough for the expense. But “Zarathustra” is not really about the organ, which is little heard after the opening. Yet it adds a dimension. And Marshall brilliantly contributed to a brilliant performance.

The orchestra has begun the season in excellent form. The strings luxuriated in the sheer gorgeousness of Strauss’ textures, the brass were mighty but under tight control, the winds glowed. Salonen was expansive yet in complete control. It was like brand-new music.

*

Los Angeles Philharmonic

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

When: 8 p.m. today

Price: $15 to $125

Contact: (323) 850-2000