Green Umbrella season opens with fresh talent

The Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group’s Green Umbrella season opener was conceived as a companion to what would have been the U.S. premiere of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s “La Passion de Simone” last weekend. The premiere didn’t happen (postponed until next season), but the planned Saariaho survey remained in place Tuesday night.

Furthermore, the concert stood on its own as a memorable event -- not only for a concentrated serving of Saariaho’s work from the mid-1990s but also as an early look at the Philharmonic’s new, astoundingly gifted assistant conductor.

His name is Lionel Bringuier and he just turned 21, but you don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to. Already, Bringuier has an expressive, precise stick technique and an instinct for musical flow that seems completely natural and inevitable, as if he had been working at his profession for decades.

He was entrusted with some difficult stuff at Walt Disney Concert Hall, notably a chamber-sized edition of Saariaho’s violin concerto, “Graal Theatre.” Loaded with knotty mini-cadenzas and lasting nearly half an hour, the piece is divided into two movements marked “Delicato” and “Impetuoso,” though there is really not much difference in texture and tempo between them. Yet Bringuier brought some things to it that eluded even Esa-Pekka Salonen in his Sony recording, including a genuine sense of tension and release and a less-abrasive dream-world ambience. His graceful physical motions were an interesting contrast with violinist Jennifer Koh’s histrionics.

Bringuier also led an eight-player version of Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Piccola Musica Notturna” -- a multiple pun involving the composer and Mozart -- catching and projecting a lyrical, singing line in this serial work. On the basis of this concert and some feverish Sibelius that he led at the Grand Avenue Festival on Sept. 30, watching Bringuier now gives one the same feeling that basketball scouts must have felt when they saw Magic Johnson at Michigan State.

The rest of the night was devoted to a pair of solo works displaying Saariaho’s trademark marriage of acoustic instruments with computer-and-performer-generated electronics, backed by abstract videos conceived by Jean-Baptiste Barriere (co-director of Saariaho’s pioneering CD-ROM “Prisma”).

“Six Japanese Gardens” found red fish blue fish percussionist Steven Schick tending to a gleaming, high-definition garden of sound, delicate even when thundering, against quivering projections bathed in a green tint no doubt inspired by the Green Umbrella.

Flutist Catherine Ransom Karoly playfully handled “NoaNoa” as digitized images of Karoly alternated with cloudy fantasy lands. It was basically the 1960s light show experience -- neither destructive nor essential to the music.