Fischer, Philharmonic irresistible

In addition to his strengths as a superior musical leader and a magnetic podium personality, the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer can boast brilliant gifts for programming. His agendas are unhackneyed, surprising, emotionally resonant.

Thursday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall, in a concert to be repeated this evening and Sunday afternoon, Fischer brought a second illuminating series of selections as part of a two-week visit to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It paired, in the first half, three orchestral gems by Antonin Dvorak with his once-ubiquitous Violin Concerto. After intermission, it interspersed three of the six parts of Bedrich Smetana’s suite “My Fatherland” with Dvorak’s Four Moravian Duets. The performances were enthusiastic, touching and ripe with details. Fischer knows how to inspire an orchestra and excite his listeners.

Smetana’s nationalistic canvases may seem potboilers at this point in musical history, yet well played, as they were by an exuberant Philharmonic on Thursday, they are hard to resist.

The evening closed with a “Moldau,” the second and best-known part of “My Fatherland,” that was a model of orchestral teamwork and gorgeous playing. The vocal soloists in the Moravian Duets were Carolyn Betty and Kelley O’Connor.

The pieces are beauteous and haunting, and the singing did them justice.

But the best came first. The trio of unexpected pieces by Dvorak, put together by Fischer, showed the orchestra at its most virtuosic and in direct touch with the composer’s heart.

This group began with the mellow introspection of “Legend,” hit a peak of controlled frenzy in the Slavonic Dance in C and closed with the seraphic beauties of the Notturno in B for strings.

Martin Chalifour, the Philharmonic’s principal concertmaster since 1995, was the soloist at the center of this event. Dvorak’s concerto is a masterpiece heard little these days but worthy of the deepest scrutiny, which it received from Chalifour, Fischer and their colleagues. The performance explored its disparate moods, technical complexities and soaring lyricism.

Chalifour’s mastery of his instrument is complete, colored by those gradations of power, texture and dynamics possible only on stringed instruments and with the human voice. In the most concentrated part of the work, the soul-baring slow movement, Chalifour’s immersion in the music became breathtaking. At the end of that Adagio, the horn section contributed a glorious benediction to an unforgettable moment.