A flute concerto like no other

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s Sunday evening concert at Royce Hall, led by music director Jeffrey Kahane and a repeat of its program Saturday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, began with Prokofiev’s genial “Classical” Symphony and ended with Mendelssohn’s solemn “Reformation” Symphony. In between came a West Coast premiere, Reza Vali’s “Toward That Endless Plain” -- a concerto for Persian ney, a forerunner of the flute.

The work, co-commissioned by LACO and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and reportedly the first of its kind, was inspired by a poem by Persian mystic Sohrab Sepehri in which a seeker “must go, / where the mythical trees are in sight. / Toward that endless plain.”

The ney, open at the top and bottom, is played anchored on the front teeth, where the movement of the mouth bends the pitch. The soloist was Khosrow Soltani, a bassoonist and old schoolmate of Vali’s at the Tehran Conservatory of Music who also specializes in medieval and Persian instruments. The soft, breathy sonorities he produced -- a bit like the sound of blowing into a bottle -- summoned an entire culture.

Although concertos naturally pit soloist against orchestra in a musical dialogue, this one’s dynamic came with a difference. The ney seemed more a respite from the dissonant, percussive orchestral passages, suggesting a peaceful world elsewhere. Even amplified, the instrument’s otherworldly sounds could not compete with the orchestra and didn’t try to.

The composition opens with a stirring cacophony, and then, as an air-raid siren swells and tapers off, Soltani’s ney takes over. It’s an odd, potentially overwhelming combination, but it works. There were other magical moments: Kahane occasionally making his modern Western orchestra sound as indigenous as the ney; the instrument playing off bacchanalian percussion and pizzicato strings; and past and present meeting briefly when the purer tone of the Western flute answered the human breath of its ancestor.

Though dubbed an Iranian Bartok, Vali has also absorbed other 20th century Western influences, from Debussy and Schoenberg on, but the heart of “Endless Plain” is his resourceful exploration of the ney’s mysterious, haunting and evocative timbral qualities. This is essentially a journey in sound.

The “Classical” Symphony, a LACO specialty, received a high-spirited reading. By contrast, Kahane and the orchestra gave the “Reformation” Symphony a fitful performance, one not entirely their fault.

The composition, its sentiments willed, can feel hollow. Mendelssohn wrote it for a religious-political occasion, but it was never performed in his lifetime. He himself dismissed it as a substandard work, and although it’s well-crafted and of interest to scholars, LACO didn’t prove him wrong.