MUSIC REVIEWS : Poetic Program by L.A. Philharmonic

Fresh from its enthusiastic reception at the Easter Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen played Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The emphasis, in a program by Beethoven, Dvorak and Franz Berwald, was on poetry, nuance and delicate balance, however, not on any kind of bombastic, willful assertions of perhaps justifiable pride.

Heinrich Schiff was the luminous, fluent soloist in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, injecting an aspect of sadness and melancholy as early as the first movement and lingering in tender expression in the second. So much so, in fact, that the Slavic vigor he and the conductor asserted in the finale initially jolted.

Salonen accompanied with great sensitivity and nuance, balancing orchestral voices and choirs cannily in full-throated passages as well as in moments that threatened to submerge the soloist.

Much of the nobility in the score depended upon him and the orchestra, however, although Schiff also contributed to the heroic poignancy in the closing bars.

The orchestra played with alert response, subtlety, refinement and richness at even the quietest dynamic levels. Concertmaster Alexander Treger played the doubled passages with the cellist with beguiling sweetness. The wind soloists provided delicate coloration.

The centrally placed novelty of the evening was the “Sinfonie singulere” (No. 3) by 19th-Century Swedish composer Franz Berwald, one of the Scandinavian composers Salonen apparently wants to introduce to Angelenos.

He may need to find more persuasive choices, however.

Dating from 1845, the work opens with a captivating kind of evocation of sunrise, as winds delicately delineate a rising C-major scale. The slow movement also begins attractively, with a lyric theme.

But little of what ensues in both cases proves memorable or all that interesting.

Even the formal experimenting--the composer’s dropping the scherzo into the middle of the slow movement (which perhaps accounts for the subtitle)--lacks much impact because the scherzo itself is a pretty wispy affair.

In fact, Berwald generally backs off from making sustained, strong statements, and this ebb and flow of tension tends to diminish interest. The work is widely considered to be the composer’s finest of his four symphonies, but it still seems a minor work.

Opening the program, Salonen explored muted, hushed tensions in Beethoven’s sprawling “Leonore” Overture No. 2, from which the composer later fashioned the more compelling and familiar Overture No. 3. With this approach, Salonen made the hammer blows and agitated sections even more dramatic, although at some expense of the epic proportions of the score. Donald Green played the off-stage trumpet calls with particular richness.