Around worlds in 80 minutes

Although more than a little odd musically and still the least programmed of Mahler’s nine symphonies, the Seventh is no longer the oddity it once was. Performances are plentiful. Michael Tilson Thomas’ recent voluptuous San Francisco Symphony recording has been nominated for two Grammys and could wind up being named best classical album next month. Newer still is Daniel Barenboim’s disquieting new Seventh disc with the Staatskapelle Berlin. The New York Philharmonic season ends with Lorin Maazel conducting it in June.

So it was not, perhaps, a great leap of imagination for Esa-Pekka Salonen to choose the 80-minute Seventh as a substitute for the originally scheduled American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “La Passion de Simone” in the Los Angeles Philharmonic program this weekend at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. That oratorio, co-commissioned by the orchestra and written for Dawn Upshaw, has been postponed until later this year, allowing time for the soprano to recover from breast cancer treatment.

Salonen had what was reported to be a great success with the Seventh two years ago when he toured it around Europe with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London. He had a spectacular success with it Friday night in Disney.

Nicknamed “Song of the Night,” the score is decidedly nocturnal. Mahler called the second and fourth (of five) movements “night music.” Sounds of nature buzz through them. Streaks of sweet nostalgia, memories of Vienna nights waltzed away, cut swaths through the first movement and the central scherzo. The symphony begins with a funeral cortege and a somber solo by an unusual tenor horn and ends with morbidity swept away in Mahler’s most upbeat finale.

The two-bit psychological explanation is that Mahler was out to exorcise demons and that he might even have succeeded in chasing one or two of them into hiding for a couple of minutes. But nothing is ever so simple in Mahler.

His previous works were his Sixth Symphony (the “Tragic”) and “Kindertotenlieder” (Songs on the Death of Children), an uncanny premonition of the death of his own daughter. His marriage was on the rocks. And he was in the process of taking the symphony -- and Western music along with it -- into intense, complex and disturbingly dissonant new realms.

Speaking to the audience Friday, Salonen described the Seventh, which was completed in 1905, as one of the most emotional pieces in the repertory, saying that at points in the work the internal pressure becomes so great that it all but collapses in upon itself like a black hole.

That is exactly how he conducted it. The sounds Mahler made with the orchestra were often fantastical. He evokes other worlds, near and far, past and present. The focus continually changes. One minute the composer is wringing your neck; the next he is off somewhere dreamily in the distance. Cowbells jingle in the night music and we are magically transported to a mystical countryside.

Salonen took the approach of an astronomer. He peered into an unpolluted, jet-black starry sky from a cold mountaintop, first with the naked eye and then with increasingly powerful telescopes. Stars twinkled, glittered, came into focus and generated very big thoughts about gravity and the beauty, meaning and impersonal power of the universe.

The performance was unlike any other, not just because it was a striking interpretation or because the Philharmonic played with riveting clarity, expression, color, delicacy and, when wanted, ferocious might but also because Disney Hall was that mountaintop, a place where sounds, whether small or large, had the kind of immediacy and intimacy that a listener could feel as though he were one-to-one with Mahler.

Salonen laid the score out with extreme clarity. Details are everything in all music, but Mahler was a particular master of instrumental detail, and the ear was for 80 minutes ever alerted to a swirling parade of changing color. Though sensitive to the Mahler who stopped to smell every rose and peer at every butterfly, Salonen also permitted Mahler his manic moodiness.

He gleefully encouraged the goblins to romp in weird night music. And he treated the last movement as an exhilarating, slightly mad rush to points unknown. If the Seventh is Mahler’s strangest symphony, its strangeness has much to do with the anticipation of a new century in which harmony, melody, rhythm were all in the process of breaking down, as were physics, painting, politics and everything else.

That was also the point of the program. Salonen began with Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10, written a few years after the Seventh. These are five pieces in less than five minutes, with thinner textures and fewer notes than ever before thought possible in music. But Friday they simply sounded like Mahler super-condensed, the consequence of that Mahlerian black hole.

The shrinking continues. The program will soon be sold on iTunes, Disney Hall shriveled to the size of an iPod shuffle. I hope it works, because it was a phenomenal concert and a phenomenon of musical nature.

mark.swed@latimes.com