Before the Fifth, a first-rate Fourth

In 1934, the Los Angeles Philharmonic learned its “Leonora” No. 2 from one of history’s most celebrated Beethoven conductors, Otto Klemperer, the orchestra’s music director at the time. By then, it already had a pretty good idea how Beethoven’s Fifth went. The first music director, Walter Henry Rothwell, put that famed symphony on the orchestra’s bill in the fall of 1919, less than a month after the orchestra was founded.

But the players learned Witold Lutoslawski’s Fourth, the symphony played in between the Beethoven overture and Fifth Symphony on Friday night at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, straight from the horse’s mouth. In fact, the great Polish composer wrote it for them and conducted the world premiere Feb. 5, 1993, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the young new music director, led the symphony again that fall, recorded it and took it on tour the following year. Lutoslawski’s last major work (the 81-year-old composer died almost exactly a year after the Pavilion premiere), it represents a proud and deeply moving bit of Philharmonic lore. And Friday was a proud and moving night. I’m willing to wager that the Fourth never sounded better.

Like all of Lutoslawski’s works, the Fourth Symphony is eloquent, original in sound and a touching exercise in freedom and control. Steven Stucky, the Philharmonic’s longtime consulting composer for new music and a leading Lutoslawski expert, begins his program note on the one-movement, 21-minute symphony by describing the Polish composer’s typical formal procedure as preparation and main event, a sort of large-scale windup and delivery.

But in this beautifully crafted, effervescent autumnal score, there is also a mixing-up. An ingratiating lyricism pervades everything, be it tender melody in the strings in the preparatory part or delicate brass fanfares in the main event, and the big climax near the end feels more mysterious than straightforward culmination. From the explosion spring scurrying strings that could be dying embers or the spark of new life. Lutoslawski, an elegant avant-gardist brilliant at evading Polish political repression, was a master of double meaning.

A dozen years have passed since Salonen’s recording, and he has found new, richer meaning in the symphony. The Philharmonic played with a loving fondness for the composer’s subtle, shimmering instrumental textures, and Disney’s acoustics made the score come to life in ways it never could in the Pavilion, no matter how genuine Lutoslawski’s gentle ministrations.

The meeting between Lutoslawski and Beethoven was part of Salonen’s project of playing the canonic nine Beethoven symphonies in the context of recent and new music. This conjunction was particularly interesting in the windup and delivery business, because Salonen included one of Beethoven’s loosest scores with one of his tightest.

The “Leonora” No. 2, one of the four overtures Beethoven wrote for his opera, “Fidelio,” is so overextended that its development section feels improvisatory. It also contains, as Robert Winter hilariously described in his pre-concert lecture, one of the greatest windup and delivery moments begun by off-stage trumpets near the end.

The Fifth Symphony’s fate-knocking-on-the-door da-da-da-DAAH is music’s most famous windup and delivery and it pervades the entire score. Salonen took an almost Lutoslawskian approach to conducting it, treating fate’s knocks less theatrically than most conductors do. Here they seemed more fleeting, part of an intricate puzzle.

Nor did Salonen attempt a dug-in old-world Viennese sound. If you think about the Philharmonic as a luxury sedan, it this time eschewed a cushy ride and an interior carved out of tons of burled wood. Instead, it favored something low slung and mean, with manual transmission and sports suspension and whatever passes for aluminum these days on the dashboard.

This Fifth wasn’t especially fast, but it was lighter than usual and felt as though it flew by, a Fifth for Stravinsky as well as Lutoslawski. In the “Leonora,” Salonen had more fun, indulging in a bigger, more exciting sound.

As with two of the Philharmonic’s Minimalism Jukebox programs, this weekend’s concerts were recorded for release on iTunes (May 9). New to the orchestra were Yun-Jie Liu (from the San Francisco Symphony), trying out for the principal viola chair, and Ariana Ghez (from the Rochester Philharmonic), auditioning for principal oboist.