Giving Schoenberg a Warm Welcome

General symphony audiences sometimes complain that Schoenberg’s music is too modern, and it grates on them. In fact, it may also grate because it is old.

The composer came of age a century ago and died a half-century ago. His Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 16, which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played Thursday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, was composed as long ago as 1909. It is hardly new to this city or its orchestra. Eugene Goosens first conducted them with the Philharmonic in 1929. Schoenberg revised them in Los Angeles in 1949. It figured in the repertory of recent Philharmonic music directors Zubin Mehta and Andre Previn.

Yet if the letters to this newspaper are any indication of a broad public sentiment, the Philharmonic may not be altogether wrong in its gingerly approach to its “Schoenberg Prism.” The festival opened three weeks ago with apology and pandering talk surrounding the first Schoenberg performance. But perhaps it is apology and pandering that put the audience ill at ease to begin with

Thursday night the orchestra tried another approach, and I think it worked splendidly. At the Upbeat Live event an hour before the concert, two inspiring local musicians and educators, Leonard Steinand Natalie Limonick, spoke about how special it had been for them to study with Schoenberg. Then from the podium, Esa-Pekka Salonen introduced the Five Pieces, which last about 17 minutes in performance, with 20 minutes of engaging and illuminating description and demonstration of the music from his point of view.

Salonen has come up with some imaginative metaphors for the Opus 16 pieces, in which moods and techniques range from violent to static, from nostalgic to futuristic, sometimes within the same short movement. For instance, the last and most puzzling of the pieces Salonen imagines as an exploded waltz balloon that leaves shards of the waltz drowning in an ocean, rather than the more common view of it as one long melody kaleidoscopically fractured throughout the orchestra. Salonen is fascinated by the amusing little ticks in the Schoenberg psyche, a psyche created in part by the historical uncertainty of his age.

He then conducted what seemed a very sane, careful, rhythmically propulsive performance that celebrated the sheer invention and the still fresh vitality of score. The central piece--in which the composer got stuck on a single chord throughout but continually shifted the instrumental colors so that the movement sounds ever-changing--was conveyed by the orchestra as beautifully as it plays Ravel on a very good night.

The rest of the evening was devoted to Mozart. Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova was to have performed Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, but a recent illness prevented her from preparing it, and she substituted Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3, an early work and not a particularly challenging one. But she had some surprises in store.

First was her appearance. The svelte violinist, who has cultivated a severe style of a playing and an austere appearance, replaced her usual black with a startling summery outfit. And in performance, she further startled with lavish and slightly loony cadenzas by one Ottovio Dantone. In fact, she proved a fascinating Mozartean all around, with her highly focused tone giving a special intensity to every phrase. And while it might be going too far to call her interpretation warm, it was nonetheless operatic, offering cogent drama at every turn. It is rare to hear a violinist applauded after every movement in this modest concerto, even rarer for it to be so deserved.

Salonen ended with a spirited and exacting performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, the “Jupiter.” As with the concerto, he reduced the orchestra to chamber size, and he asked for, and mostly got, bracing playing. Salonen has been slow in coming around to a Mozart style of his own, but he had one here, taking as much delight in Mozart’s contrapuntal complexity and rhythmic boldness as he does in Schoenberg’s. He reminded us that Mozart was, even in the grand style of this symphony, the Schoenberg of his day, an unpredictable composer who continually tested the limits of classical balance with seditious asymmetry. His contemporaries accused him at times of being compulsively innovative. This “Jupiter” sped by Schoenberg-like--flickering, excited and teeming with life.

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The Los Angeles Philharmonic program repeats tonight at 8 and Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., $26-$78. (323) 850-2000.