An Evening of Irony, Symbolism

Esa-Pekka Salonen is not casual about the making of concert programs. So the choice of Beethoven’s overture “The Consecration of the House” to open the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s last program of 1997 was surely meant as a symbolic and ironic gesture. This was, after all, the year that the Walt Disney Concert Hall had originally been scheduled to open.

But it was also a friendly gesture. Although construction has yet to begin on the new house, this was a year, finally, of assurances that it will be ready in 2001.

Still, the pertinence of the Beethoven was downright eerie Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Lillian Disney, who instigated the Disney Hall project with a $50-million gift 10 years ago, died Tuesday at age 98. The performance of the buoyant 11-minute overture, music so secure in its sense of affirmation and played with clarity and care, was dedicated to her.

And that dedication was but one statement of an evening full of context. In a brilliantly concocted program, Salonen offered meaningful alternatives to what we normally call the holiday spirit. He is not exactly a conductor from whom one expects evocations of dancing sugarplums or Viennese waltzes--last week’s religious epic was the sardonic “Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien,” for which Debussy wrote the music.

Instead he turned to John Williams, whose music is almost inescapable this time of year, since he is invariably responsible for the soundtrack of a year-end blockbuster (“Amistad” is the current one). But this time Salonen reminded us, with the Violin Concerto, that there is a more earnest side to Williams that we don’t hear so often.

And by ending the evening with the Fourth Symphony by Danish composer Carl Nielsen, Salonen offered his audience something it may need more than anything else during the holiday season--a respite from fantasy and fairy tale, and a good hard look at how the human spirit can thrive under hardship.

The Danish composer may never have had to face Los Angeles freeways under the combined conditions of an El Nin~o downpour, Christmas shopping and rush hour, but he did live through World War I. And when the war was over, in 1916, he wrote this symphony and called it “The Inextinguishable,” explaining that even were the world to be destroyed by fire and flood, new life would emerge.

Nielsen is a composer, like Berlioz or Janacek, whose musical language has a strangeness and elusiveness that seems to stand outside just about everything going on around him in music, yet sounds to us now utterly connected with his time and with humanity. The Fourth Symphony surges with energy that is unmistakably uplifting. It grabs the listener by the lapels. And although there is whimsy and offbeat humor later, that utter sense of confirmation is never in doubt.

Salonen, who has a special feel for Nielsen, took an aggressive and epic approach. He let the music surge, controlling its massive swirls of texture and timbres. His growing experience with Mahler and Bruckner helps quite a bit in achieving a grandiose scope, and the Philharmonic understands his requirements for magnificent sound. The big timpani conflagration in the last movement couldn’t have sounded more fabulous (well, actually, it could have in a hall with a more visceral acoustic, when it gets consecrated).

But more important, Salonen understands all the peculiarities of Nielsen, the way the great affirmative gestures that make this piece so inspiring are not resolutions of conflicts but something more elemental.

John Williams is also a composer we tend to remember for an affirmative, epic style. But his Violin Concerto, written in 1974 shortly before he turned to “Star Wars,” is more somber. It fits comfortably, maybe too comfortably, into the genre of conservative American violin concertos. Its kin are the Barber and Schuman, although it is not quite as distinctive as either.

But it is a serious work, very well made and with an appealingly expressive and grandly rhapsodic solo part that was played with gusto by the Philharmonic concertmaster Alexander Treger. It also affects an audience. Many gave it a standing ovation, waiting, however, until the composer came out for a bow, as if they had to be reassured that it really was that John Williams.

* The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen repeat this program tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $8-$63. (213) 850-2000.