Salonen, Andsnes discover a kinship

Stereotyping is dangerous, especially in a world where national boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred -- or, in Thomas Friedman’s now famous term, flattened. Yet it’s hard to deny that it was a pleasure and an education to hear Finland’s Esa-Pekka Salonen and Norway’s Leif Ove Andsnes performing Scandinavian music at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Thursday night.

Neither Salonen nor Andsnes should be considered a nationalist musician; both are cosmopolitans with a more than healthy interest in new music from wherever it comes. But there was something extra in their music-making Thursday; you could sense that they were tapping passionately into their roots, revivifying music that others have long stashed in the routine file.

Upon hearing Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic rip fervently and impulsively through Sibelius’ “Finlandia,” with passages that took off in electrifying gusts, you wondered how this rabble-rousing piece could have fallen so far out of fashion since World War II (overexposure was the main reason).

Salonen also refused to take for granted the accompaniment to Grieg’s Piano Concerto, which has become a hoary relic of a sentimental past for some, instead bringing a rare brooding intensity to the slow movement and giving a rollicking kick to the tempo of the finale.

For Andsnes, the Grieg concerto is a signature piece of sorts -- at the age of 35, he has already recorded it twice -- but not a static one. The precious drifting of his first recording, on Virgin, gave way to a more animated, more focused approach on his second, for EMI, and Thursday’s performance was even faster and tougher.

Of course, that’s a relative description, for Andsnes remains one of the most ultra-refined technicians on the planet, but he is clearly edging toward a more energetic, less moonstruck view of this piece, which plays to Salonen’s tastes.

Completing the sweep of the northern Scandinavian region, Salonen turned to the sprawling Serenade in F Major of Sweden’s Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927), whose music has gone international only in the last 20 years, thanks in great part to that prolific recording machine, Estonian-born conductor Neeme Jarvi.

The Serenade is not earth-shaking music, but it is gorgeously orchestrated, intricately crafted, often deliciously rambunctious, in a league with the virtuosic Richard Strauss of “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” and the Divertimento.

There are actually six movements, but Salonen played only five (the original “Reverenza” second movement, which is of equal quality, was deleted by the composer). The Philharmonic, which had never played the work before, betrayed some unease with its difficulties; otherwise the musicians were caught up in the conductor’s fervor.

Breaking the Scandinavian monopoly, Andsnes added Mendelssohn’s folk-like Song Without Words, Opus 67, No. 2, as a solo encore after the Grieg.

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

When: 2 p.m. today

Price: $15 to $129

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com

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Where: Arlington Theatre, 1317 State St., Santa Barbara

When: 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $30 to $75

Contact: (805) 963-4408