Commingling of worlds old and new

Every decade or two, the Los Angeles Philharmonic finds a pressing need to connect with an Old World master. The great German conductor Otto Klemperer was music director in the ‘30s, the great Dutch conductor Eduard van Beinum in the ‘50s, the great Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini in the ‘80s. Kurt Sanderling, another old-school German great, forged close ties with the orchestra in the late ‘80s and ‘90s.

Now that role is being assigned to Berlin-born Christoph von Dohnanyi, who is in town for two weeks of mainly classics at Walt Disney Concert Hall (including overseeing the orchestra’s obligatory Mozart 250th birthday celebration next week). He will return next season to lead a Brahms symphony cycle.

No one need fear that the orchestra of the future, the Philharmonic seems to be telling us, is foolhardy.

Indeed, there appears not to be a foolhardy bone in Dohnanyi’s body. He is a serious, thorough musician, and Thursday he led a magnificent concert that was not all that old-fashioned and that even allowed room for some fire amid its admirable Old World refinement.

In his 18 distinguished years as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, Dohnanyi could never have been accused of neglecting music of his century or his time. His taste ran to heavy, difficult music, but not exclusively. He took a surprising and gratifying shine to Philip Glass. He set a tone of intelligent and far-reaching programming (one that has continued under his successor, Franz Welser-Most).

The Philharmonic has, in fact, gone slightly overboard in Old World-ing Dohnanyi, as his well-balanced program Thursday night demonstrated. He led off with a recent 12-minute score, “Night’s Black Bird,” by Harrison Birtwistle. Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto had the benefit of Yefim Bronfman as a thrilling soloist. Stravinsky’s “Firebird” replaced the originally scheduled Strauss tone poem “Ein Heldenleben.”

Many in Britain hail Birtwistle as England’s greatest living composer, but he has always been a hard sell in America. Every now and then, our orchestras -- Cleveland more than most -- attempt one of his dark, bulging scores. His impressive operas, however, are entirely ignored here. You’d think someone on this side of the pond would be tempted at least by “The Second Mrs. Kong,” in which King Kong pursues Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. What could be more Hollywood than that?

Birtwistle may scare Americans with his ineffably spooky harmony or with the way history -- music, art, literature -- weighs heavily upon him. John Dowland’s gloomy Renaissance lute piece “In Darkness Let Me Dwell” inspired “Night’s Black Bird,” which was written for the Cleveland Orchestra in 2004. It is a follow-up to Birtwistle’s previous depressing Cleveland commission, “The Shadow of Night.”

Living in a different climate might help draw a listener into this music, but Birtwistle does have a remarkable ability to paint shades of black with an orchestra. He’s got his distinctive sound. It’s a heavy one. But he also has a unique talent for levitating his thick string chords, his grumpy or growling brass and his angrily chirping winds in the night air.

The web of melodic material in “Night’s Black Bird” never quite comes into focus. Something is stirring, but you don’t know what it is, which is what makes Birtwistle so fascinating -- and so frightening. Dohnanyi, conducting it, appeared right at home.

Beethoven’s C-minor Concerto is also stern stuff. Here Dohnanyi enforced by-the-book classicism -- or tried to. He did presumably prevent Bronfman from banging the piano to near smithereens, as the Russian pianist sometimes seems he might when he plays big Romantic concertos. Bronfman did nevertheless attack the Steinway with a spiky ferocity that is engagingly all his own. He is a force of nature, a force that held even the refined Dohnanyi in its exhilarating grip.

The “Firebird” -- given in the original 1910 version for no-holds-bared huge orchestra, including three harps -- became, in Dohnanyi’s hands, an exercise in stunning virtuosity, but not the same exercise in stunning virtuosity that it is in Salonen’s hands.

The performance was not about brilliance or color (although it was brilliant and colorful). It was not particularly Russian sounding, nor particularly French sounding.

It was smooth. Smooth and airy like Mendelssohn. Silken smooth like nothing I’ve ever heard before. The instrumental blend was such that there was almost no individuality of players, just one vast sonic organism executing fabulously difficult moves with an almost superhuman Olympian grace.

I find Boulez or Salonen more moving and more stimulating in their ability to make early Stravinsky vital. But Dohnanyi has uncovered a deep, delectable and decisive source of pleasure in this music.

*

Los Angeles Philharmonic

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

When: 8 tonight, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $15 to $129

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