Newsday, June 2005

Marion Lignana Rosenberg is a freelance writer.

LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting. Attended Friday and Sunday at Avery Fisher Hall. For information, visit www.lincolncenter.org or call 212-875-5766.

In New York, standing ovations are as cheap and plentiful as pushcart frankfurters. Still, even by our inflated standards, the applause that greeted last weekend's concerts by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen was raucous, prolonged and uncommonly warm.

With their glamorous home, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Hall, pictured on a newly-issued postage stamp and crammed with smart young crowds, Salonen and the Philharmonic are the envy of the fretful, battered classical music world. And their shrewdly wrought, stunningly played Avery Fisher Hall programs showed that they have far more than glitz going for them.

The highlight of their visit was the local premiere of John Adams's "The Dharma at Big Sur" (2003) for electric violin and orchestra, inspired by Jack Kerouac's spiritual tribulations amid the crushing majesty of the California coast. A winsome fellow with Kenny G curls and an endearingly blissed-out air, soloist Tracy Silverman drew from his souped-up fiddle ecstatic shrieks, soulful growls, and swoops and slides of phosphorescent radiance. They wove their way through Adams's gorgeously crafted orchestration—building from an inchoate haze to a frantic, thumping finale, through interludes glistening with blips and twitters, gamelan splashes and glossy, saturated harmonies.

At mainstream concert halls, living composers tend to win dutiful applause, at best, but the Avery Fisher Hall matinee crowd greeted Adams with hollers of delight.

Sunday's program opened and closed with works made of similarly heady stuff. Charles Ives's "The Unanswered Question" (1906) layers lonely trumpet queries and bristling flute responses over a sad, swirling lullaby played by offstage strings. Salonen and his musicians performed in near-total darkness, to arresting effect. Like Adams's "Dharma," Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloé" (1909-12) stirs up a primal cloud of sound in its opening measures and resolves in anarchic, orgasmic tumult. While short on Gallic suavity, Salonen's reading was intoxicatingly rich-toned and carnal, with wind playing of sultry insouciance and glad singing from the Concert Chorale of New York.

A distinctively Russian grotesquerie pervaded Friday’s concert, which opened with Mussorgsky's "St. John's Night on Bald Mountain" (1867), heard not in Rimsky-Korsakov’s sanitized version but in all its hair-raising, roughshod glory. Shostakovich's Concert for Piano, Trumpet and Strings (1933) featured Alexander Toradze's tense, aggressive pianism and James Wilt's pungent, virtuosic trumpet playing, along with velvety, melancholy string phrases and gaudy outbursts of manic jollity.

As played by Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 (1946-53), a musical depiction of Stalin's reign, deserves an encomium of its own. It opened with rubbery low string phrases, traversed desolate landscapes whose gauzy textures suddenly shredded and dissolved, roared with marches of nihilistic stupidity, and lurched in sullen, graceless parodies of Tchaikovsky waltzes. The playing was sometimes ragged, stripped of all ingratiating prettiness, and gut-wrenchingly beautiful.

You know that smoggy megalopolis on the left coast? They don't call it the City of Angels for nothing.