On the heels of darkness comes the light

The ending of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 is so terrifying, it’s not surprising that after playing it Friday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic sought immediate refuge in Haydn and Tchaikovsky.

The last of the Soviet composer’s great essays in symphonic form, the A-major Symphony is a hard nut for an orchestra to crack, even under the skillful guidance of young conductor Andrey Boreyko.

It is a diffuse, chameleon-like work, composed in 1971, four years before the composer’s death, that raises questions for Shostakovich’s most ardent fans. Was he losing his powers of concentration? Did he stop caring about his listeners? Are the “William Tell” quotations just jokes or ironic takes on the possibility of defeating dictators?

One thing is clear. The last movement, which opens with the Annunciation of Death motif from Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” is all about dying -- and dying not in a romantic or abstract sense but as a cold, clinical, hopeless, friendless process: death without transfiguration. The final measures can seize the listener with breath-stopping dread.

It took awhile Friday to shake that feeling and accept the classical niceties and imaginative surprises in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C, a work written circa 1765 but discovered only in 1961.

Boreyko led a suave, sophisticated, post-intermission reading that complemented the dazzlingly engaged, witty performance of cellist Alban Gerhardt, who like the conductor was making his Disney Hall debut. This young, Berlin-born virtuoso is a talent to watch and cherish.

Boreyko closed the program with Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Fantasy-Overture, highlighted by the conductor evoking a rare sense of gentle tenderness in the great love theme.

The program also showcased many of the orchestra’s principal players. One who must be acknowledged is cellist Peter Stumpf, who in the Adagio of the Shostakovich established the deeply expressive sensibility that would be extinguished two movements later.