Series finale has Finnish touches

Monday night Esa-Pekka Salonen served as curator for a concert in Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School. The program, the last of this season’s Monday Evening Concerts, featured two Scandinavian friends he felt deserved more exposure hereabouts.

To begin, Salonen asked Kimmo Hakola, a former classmate of his at Finland’s Sibelius Academy, if he could identify what made his music Finnish. It was a good question, given that Hakola’s 1991 breakthrough composition, “Capriole” for clarinet and cello, throws some outrageous fake Mongolian folk music into an environment of hard-edged European Modernism. After that, he never looked back. Anything goes in his rambunctious music, be it ersatz klezmer, Liberace-style pianism or heaven knows what.

In response, Hakola hemmed and hawed about the sound of silence, which Salonen joked was a perfectly Finnish response. Finally, Hakola said that, well, he is from Finland, so he hoped his work wouldn’t be heard as anything else. “Like Swedish,” Salonen said with a burst of laughter.

I might easily have mistaken the high-spirited drumming in Hakola’s Chamber Concerto, the big piece on the first half of Monday’s program, as Mexican without having first heard Hakola speak. Then again, music by a Mexican contemporary of Hakola, Ana Lara, played Sunday by the Pacific Symphony, might have been taken for Finnish in the strikingly inventive way she used wind instruments.

Hakola, who is tall and slightly lumbering, conducted the concerto adequately but without much flair. He let the music take care of that. It’s a big piece, more than a half hour long, and all over the map.

The great movement is the longest and quietest, the central Amoroso. Against a backdrop of ever-changing string harmonics, an English horn seduced. A trumpet solo had the character of Miles Davis at his most introspective. At the Amoroso’s end the piano added glittery, Las Vegas-y arpeggios. By all rights, they should cheapen the sentiment, but they don’t. By this point, Hakola’s already won over a susceptible listener, and the arpeggios become just one more agent of seduction.

Not everything in the five-movement concerto is so effective. Hakola often doesn’t know when to stop. Silence, it turns out, is not one of his virtues. But the final Misterioso, more merry than mysterious, is another winner, and the piano and bells at the end left the audience smiling.

“Capriole,” played after intermission and like the chamber concerto a Los Angeles premiere, is a dazzler. So was the performance by two young players with extremely bright futures -- clarinetist Carol McGonnell and cellist Claire Bryant.

The evening’s other composer was Rolf Wallin, a Norwegian born in 1957 and with more local connections, having studied at UC San Diego. He has a passion for electronics and for treating music as if it could rewire the brain a little.

“The Age of Wire and String,” another local premiere, is a sextet for violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet and piano inspired by the meta-fiction of Ben Marcus. But Marcus’ Gertrude Steinian prose oddities are only vaguely suggested by Wallin’s rustling, braying, trilling piece, which was brilliantly played.

Wallin’s “Lautleben,” written as a radio opera in 1999 and then given a video component by Tone Myskja last year, featured a startling improvising singer, Sidsel Endresen, who can make herself sound like a tape running backward. Where Hakola threw in the kitchen sink, Wallin began with the sound of a shower and then went deeper and deeper into a sonic inner space of circuitry. The video was tastefully abstract. Jonathan Burke handled the electronic soundscape.

The program ended the first season for the venerable Monday Evening Concerts since the series’ expulsion last year from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. All the performances Monday, as they have been throughout the season, were first-rate. The Calder Quartet, for instance, made up the most of the string section in Hakola’s Chamber Concerto, which is luxury casting.

Next season has not yet been announced. But Justin Urcis, who now runs the series, has made it a rousing success and proved that there is not just life, but fresh new life, after LACMA.

mark.swed@latimes.com