Salonen melds with Bruckner
Los Angeles has a Bruckner tradition. Some of the last century’s most notable Brucknerians -- Otto Klemperer, Eduard van Beinum, Zubin Mehta, Carlo Maria Giulini -- were music directors here. In fact, a Bruckner sound -- brassy, majestic, cinematically full-blown and then some -- was what Mehta envisioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic during his 16 years at its helm.
This is also, to some extent, the Hollywood sound, and for all his sleek modernizing of the Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen has not messed with the Bruckner strands in the orchestra’s DNA. He’s a believer too, and revels in those organ-like sonorities that characterize the Austrian composer’s imposing symphonies. Acoustically, Walt Disney Concert Hall -- warm yet loud -- is an ideal Bruckner venue.
Thursday night, Salonen led a stirring account of the Sixth Symphony. And as is the custom when Bruckner is played in America, the great 19th century symphonist drove at least a few people out of the building.
It didn’t matter that L.A. audiences are admirably open-minded and patient, nor how well trained they are to be quiet as mice in Disney. It didn’t matter how ingrained Bruckner’s sonic sensibility is in our collective symphonic consciousness. It didn’t even matter that Salonen had been away from the orchestra for three months. There is something inherently foreign about Bruckner in the New World. Germans and Austrians receive the symphonies with religious reverence. Americans head for the exits.
I am at a loss to explain why that is. And the mystery of the Sixth’s lack of popularity among Bruckner’s mature symphonies is all the more puzzling. At less than an hour, the score is on the short side for a Bruckner symphony. It is also one of his most confident works. An insecure composer, he could be easily bullied into cutting and revising his long-winded symphonies, but he got the Sixth right immediately and knew it.
Even so, he couldn’t get it played during his lifetime. Mahler conducted the premiere in Vienna in 1899, three years after Bruckner’s death. Despite all the Bruckner boys who ran our Philharmonic, L.A. didn’t hear the Sixth until Daniel Barenboim conducted here in 1977. The Philharmonic’s program book for this week’s performances illustrates the notes on the symphony with photos of Bruckner and Mahler. Mahler’s is a third larger than Bruckner’s and dominates the page.
Salonen believes in this piece. He first conducted the Sixth with the Philharmonic in the mid-’80s. That performance was brilliant Salonen, a young conductor absorbed in nuance and in danger of self-indulgence. Thursday’s performance was brilliant Bruckner.
By this point in his career, Salonen has absorbed Bruckner into his own thinking. He has a fascination with musical machines and, in his own pieces, he enjoys setting up interlocking mechanical strands and letting them loose. Bruckner often did something of the same thing.
The Sixth begins with fidgety violins nervously ticking off a fixated rhythmic pattern. The Philharmonic fiddles were bright, almost electronic-sounding. Under them, the cellos and basses played a powerful, expressive, deep melody, and it came as if swelling from the bowels of the hall, a beast rousing from slumber.
Great performances start like that. The sound seemed almost unimaginably fresh. And the feeling of that opening was of a high-tech roller coaster, frightening but secure, leaving the gate.
The slow movement is very slow, very big and a wonder. Sometimes Bruckner’s pace can feel like that of a snail, but a very busy and observant snail taking in the complexity of its environment. The effect is certainly unhurried, but the Brucknerian metabolism is a messy thing, full of all kinds of harmonic and rhythmic irregularities, complex, fascinating and, I think, very beautiful. Salonen’s slow movement pondered deeply without being ponderous. The Scherzo and Finale were dazzling, dizzying. The orchestra seemed to remember everything it ever knew about playing Bruckner.
The program began with Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Michele Zukovsky was the soloist. This is familiar ground, the principal clarinetist having joined the Philharmonic 47 years ago, when she was a teenager. She can be an exuberant player and is often immediately recognizable in the wind section by her bobbing head.
On this occasion, she was restrained. Her tone had a buttery smoothness, and she played as if the concerto, a late and subtle score, were chamber music.
The piece, a love letter to an instrument Mozart adored, is second nature to clarinetists, who learn it in childhood. Zukovsky, though, did not rely on memory. She read from the score. She kept the clarinet close to her chest. She listened to the orchestra and blended in with textures rather than dominated. Salonen, who was 3 when Zukovsky joined the orchestra, deferred to her.
No one left early. Zukovsky is one of the orchestra’s members best loved by its public, and the performance demonstrated why.
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Los Angeles Philharmonic
Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.
When: 8 tonight
Price: $40 to $142
Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com
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Also
Where: Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Orange County
Performing Artscenter, 615 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
When: 3 p.m. Sunday
Price: $25 to $250
Contact: (949) 553-2422 or www.philharmonicsociety.org
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