Where Beethoven and Sibelius meet

With scarcely a pause for breath, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic took a timeout for an interlude of Beethoven and Sibelius on Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall before they plunge back into “The Tristan Project” next week.

This was a crossroads of sorts, one that looked back at last season’s “Beethoven Unbound” series and forward to next season’s “Sibelius Unbound.”

It also turns out that Sibelius’ “Four Legends From the Kalevala” (also known as “Lemminkainen Legends” or the Lemminkainen Suite) was the indirect result of “Tristan and Isolde’s” ability to intimidate as well as inspire. You won’t find the connection in the program notes, but you will in Salonen’s excellent liner notes to the Sony recording of “Four Legends” that he made with the Phil the year before he became its music director.

It seems that Sibelius, fired up by a Wagner essay, set out to write an opera, “The Building of the Boat,” but the pathologically self-critical composer abandoned the piece shortly after experiencing what must have been a shattering performance of “Tristan” in Munich, Germany. Nevertheless, Sibelius worked some of the material from his opera into “Four Legends.” Indeed, “The Swan of Tuonela” was to have been the opera’s prelude.

This connection may have been on Salonen’s mind this week -- and he channeled a lot of the uninhibited fervor that he put into “Tristan” into Sibelius while respecting his countryman’s entirely different sound world.

His “Four Legends” is more extreme now than it was in 1991: The swift portions went faster, the accents were more emphatic and abrupt, the “Swan” glided at a slower, spellbound pace. He conveys the Sibelius chill even more intensely now; the string tremolos of “Lemminkainen in Tuonela” shivered with a sound that seemed eerily contemporary.

Unlike most of the select few who bother to play the entire suite, Salonen took the four movements in the original, rather than the published, order, with “Swan” coming third instead of second. That made more musical sense, with Peter Stumpf’s cello at the end of “Lemminkainen in Tuonela” telegraphing his corresponding solo at the beginning of “Swan.” And Carolyn Hove, whose English horn lent such eloquent repose to “Tristan” the night before, did the same for Sibelius.

The Beethoven piece was a far more frequent visitor, the Violin Concerto, with Viktoria Mullova’s precise, wire-thin tone and straight-ahead approach dovetailing comfortably with Salonen’s clean-lined, classical collaboration at conventional tempos.

The cadenzas, penned by Mullova’s harpsichord partner, Ottavio Dantone, were rather busy affairs that contained apparent references to one J.S. Bach. Although the finale could have used some humor, all went well.

*

Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 2 p.m. today

Price: $15 to $135

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com