A night for taking in the fresh heirs

The Los Angeles Philharmonic over the weekend handed over the orchestra to the next generation. The music may not have been happy, but the occasion was. Actually, the music was too. It just wasn’t supposed to be.

First, Thomas Ades conducted his “Asyla,” a study in madness of sorts, written nine years ago when he was in his mid-20s. Then Joana Carneiro, the orchestra’s assistant conductor, led Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony, his death song, also of sorts. Saturday night was her first assignment to a subscription concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a rite of passage for this young Portuguese conductor into the Philharmonic big time.

Under different circumstances, I don’t think the connection would have been so obvious between a work of postmodern dazzlement -- full of arrestingly weird sounds and with a feisty movement meant to evoke the London drug-driven club scene -- and the emotionally restless symphony Tchaikovsky wrote before presumably committing suicide, fearful of being exposed for his homosexuality. Ades celebrates sexuality, Tchaikovsky suffers the ultimate fate for his.

These two “symphonies” (Ades doesn’t call his four-movement, 25-minute score one, but we can) have in common their irresistible voluptuousness, their wondrous use of bass instruments, their incongruous instances of high spirits and their sweet sentimentality. They share, as well, musical structure (slow, pathos-laden beginning and ending movements), an advanced rhythmic language (Tchaikovsky wrote his second movement in 5/4 time), and a third movement that thrillingly rushes toward ecstasy (quite literally in Ades, who titles his “Ecstasio” and has the drug Ecstasy in mind).

Both performances also helped drive home these striking similarities. “Asyla” is, by far, best known through the advocacy of Simon Rattle, who commissioned it and recorded it when he was music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and who champions it now at the Berlin Philharmonic -- it opened his first concert as music director in 2000 and he included it on an Asian tour with the orchestra last year. In 2000, Rattle also led the L.A. Philharmonic’s first performance of “Asyla” at the Ojai Festival.

Ades’ performance, which concluded his two-year “On Location” residency with the Philharmonic, was more pointed, less interpreted, than Rattle’s and a bit slower and more cautious. But the Los Angeles players, at home with new music, have an easier time with complicated rhythms and funny sounds than their colleagues in Birmingham or Berlin. And they are less buttoned down when it comes to musically clubbing.

So Saturday, “Asyla” sounded as fresh, original and exciting as ever. In 1997, it had announced a major new orchestral composer on the scene. That announcement has proven accurate. Ades, wildly popular here as composer, conductor and pianist, will continue his relationship with the orchestra, we are told, but we are not yet told when or in what capacity.

Carneiro’s “Pathetique” was equally full of beans. The first movement was compellingly quicksilver -- so much so, it almost got away from her -- and rhythmically captivating. The movement’s big tune was much slower and more dreamily rhapsodic than melancholic. She then gave the second movement, the 5/4 “waltz,” an unusual sensual swing.

Thomas May’s program notes spoke of Tchaikovsky’s hollow triumph in the swaggering third movement. Carneiro, though, expresses ambiguity uniquely. She got wind instruments to create oddly buzzing tones, almost as though this were Tchaikovsky channeled by Ades.

Carneiro clearly conducts from a youthful perspective. For her, Tchaikovsky’s farewell, his heart-rending Finale, was moonlit and calm, more the end of the day or a love affair than a life. But there need be no rush for her to find her way into this score’s death-fixation. She has a vibrant personality. She has creative interpretive ideas. She is not afraid to infuse dark Russian music with brighter colors.

It was a Portuguese “Pathetique,” novel and unhackneyed, a “Pathetique” for the Ades generation and a delight. The Philharmonic’s record with its assistant conductors is very good. Carneiro is in exactly the right place at the right time.

mark.swed@latimes.com