Spiraling up with Salonen

Esa-Pekka Salonen, clever composer that he is, might well have been first to come up with the latest theory about how the ancient Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. He pretty much described the process in “Helix,” a celebratory overture that he conducted to open his Los Angeles Philharmonic program at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Friday morning.

Just last week, a French architect made news by contending that Pharaoh Khufu’s tomb was built from the inside with the help of a massive corkscrew ramp. “Helix,” Salonen explained to the audience before leading its U.S. premiere, has a similar structure. The score follows the surface inside a cone. A somber melody played by piccolo and bassoon undergoes a gradual sonic expansion that builds to an explosive ending.

Curiously, the work’s genesis had nothing to do with helixes or pyramids but with vodka, Valery Gergiev and World War II. In his comments to the audience Friday, Salonen described a night in St. Petersburg, Russia, drinking with Gergiev during which he accepted an invitation to write a six-minute piece celebrating the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which the Russian conductor would premiere in London in 2005. Salonen said that when the contract arrived, he realized this was out of the question and that he agreed instead to write a short piece, but not one attached to any theme so grand, and came up with the spiral notion.

Technically, that translated into a study in speed. “Helix” starts slowly at the wide end of the cone and accelerates as it spirals to the tip. But as the tempo gets faster, Salonen lengthens the phrases to give the feeling of pressure building up as music is pushed through an increasingly small space, like icing forced through a pastry cone. The work, which lasts nine minutes, ends with an orchestra in furious motion getting louder and louder but going nowhere. Salonen stops at the exciting point of maximum pressure.

In Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which followed, the process seemed to start all over again. Here really is music made from a world war’s legacy. It was commissioned in 1931 by Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who in 1914 had lost his right arm fighting with the Austrians on the Russian front. This score too begins in a weirdly quiet place. Here the rumblingly lowest registers of the orchestra gradually erupt into bursts of color.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet was the superb soloist Friday. In many ways, this is a concerto for left hand and right foot, given how crucial pedaling is in helping create the illusion of 10 fingers covering 88 keys. Thibaudet managed the lopsided acrobatic feat with great style. Clarity, precision and percussive brilliance are among his stylistic trademarks, and here he brought along a sense that hot jazz underlay a dark exterior.

Excerpts from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” were the final portion of the program. Salonen has devised his own selection of numbers from the ballet to provide a 43-minute tour through the narrative. The Philharmonic played brightly. Salonen brought out wonderful colors -- the celesta, for instance, adding just the right touch of glitter to the dreams of the young Juliet.

If this incisive and a touch chilly performance seemed less music for the dance than a study in orchestral intensity, such an approach fit well with “Helix” and the Ravel concerto. All morning edges were hard, whether they traced a spiral or the empty space of a missing limb.

The one bit of softness was visual and regrettable. Frou-frou drapery hung atop the Disney organ like a doily for its pipes. According to the Philharmonic, a nicer curtain meant to hide stage machinery installed for the upcoming “Tristan Project” never arrived. But the drapery sent exactly the wrong message for a morning of music-making bent on transparency.

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mark.swed@latimes.com