Review | L.A. Phil Shines, as Expected, in Home and Away Games

CAMA’s Orchestral Season Closed with Another Dazzling Performance by the L.A. Philharmonic at Santa Barbara’s Granada Theatre, Although Without the Earlier Promise of Boulez on the Menu

Esa Pekka Salonen with the L.A. Phillarmonic | Photo: Courtesy

It may be fair to say the most reliable and renewable pleasure, in terms of live orchestral culture in Santa Barbara over the past 100+ years, has come courtesy of the increasingly important Los Angeles Philharmonic. ( I’ve only been privy to the past 35 or so concert years, but am making an educated guess with this assertion.) The orchestra shares with the hosting organization CAMA a birth year of 1919, and has performed under CAMA’s auspices at least once a year in our fair town.

Once again, our high expectations were handily met and possibly exceeded with the L.A. Phil’s latest trip up the 101 to the Granada Theatre last Friday, in a rousing if fairly tame program of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, the ear-friendly Bartok Piano Concerto No. 3 (with the lucid and masterful Pierre-Laurent Aimard as soloists) and Beethoven’s Third Symphony “Eroica.” At the helm of the orchestra was maestro emeritus Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has appeared in CAMA concerts more than a dozen times with different orchestras, but was making his first local L.A. Phil appearance since 2008.

It felt like old home week, in the best way, and also a warm, fuzzy and erudite final touch to another season of CAMA orchestra concerts.

Salonen, one of the most significant conductor/composers on the current scene, is widely deemed responsible for upgrading the already-strong L.A. Phil ranks into a coveted international status during his 18-year period as music director. His firm, focused and yet also flexible approach to conducting — not to mention a palpable rapport with these musicians — made for a powerful example of orchestral music-making at the Granada.

Listening satisfactions aside, some of us were nursing lingering grievances about the diluting shift of programming, from what was originally announced as a concert bookended by music of the late, great French modernist Pierre Boulez. This would have been an extremely rare occasion to hear the “difficult” — I call it coolly engrossing, and some of the 20^th century’s most important — serialist music of Boulez in Santa Barbara, in sync with his centennial.

What else can a poor Boulez fan do, but hop in the car and head down to the Walt Disney Concert Hall to hear what we were missing? I made the pilgrimage the night before the Granada concert and was more than thrilled by what I encountered there: this was likely the most engaging musical experience of my concert life so far this year.

To be fair, once having heard and seen the production logistics of the elaborate centerpiece, Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna, it’s understandable that the L.A. Phil chose to not have it travel up to the Granada, apart from any fear of scaring off conservative local listeners. The performance, in this incarnation, did seem almost Disney Hall-specific.

The work unfolded on an enlarged Disney Hall stage, and with modules of musicians placed spatially throughout the upper quarters of the famous venue’s Frank Gehry-designed vineyard formation space. Only brass and percussion elements were on the stage.

This production also incorporated a new dance element by the L.A. Dance Project, an inventive response to Boulez’s dissonant yet controlled detailed score. Frankly, though, I couldn’t focus on the choreographed bodies as I was hypnotized by the tour de force conducting duties of Salonen, almost transformed into a dancer on his own terms.

Donning a jumbo black coat which had been randomly sliced — as if in a Dadaistic frenzy in the wardrobe department — and wearing a red glove on one hand and a black one on the other, Salonen commanded the multitasking task of conducting the score’s highly detailed, crisp statements and silences — and literal spaces of the hall. Each hand gestured to particular musical groupings, onstage and situated far up in the house, with the added cue-giving element of strategic head nods. At work’s end, a dancer had laid down on Salonen’s podium and the air and sense of time in the room was effectively suspended.

The effect, atmospherically and as a musical phenomenon, was mesmerizing, as was Boulez’s tribute to the late Italian modernist composer for whom the work was written — first in 1975 and later revised in 1987. Boulez’s orchestral music, heard in a great hall and realized by a committed and precision-geared orchestra and conductor with an ear and passion for the music, is unlike any other music in the canon. A certain cool, objective and anti-sentimental emotionality is the upshot, as it was at Disney Hall last week.

Boulez’ famous tendency for revising past work was even more critical in the concert’s opening set of pieces, selections from Notations, for orchestra and piano (played by Aimard). The four-score package opened, logically, the simple piano theme he wrote as a 20-year-old in 1945 — based on powers of 12 — leading into a later orchestral version, a slightly more elaborate solo piano theme, and the grand, longer and dense finale, Notations VII for orchestra, written in 1998 but revised in 2004, nearly 60 years after the young composer etched out its origin story.

Between the pair of Boulez points of focus, the L.A. Phil did more than due diligence in honoring Boulez at 100. Boulez commanded the program and the agenda of last weekend’s L.A. Phil Disney Hall plan, but the program also included Debussy’s Le Mer and the same Aimard-featuring Bartok Piano Concerto we heard at the Granada. At the end of the Granada concert — and the CAMA season — basking in the glories of the Salonen-guided Eroica, everything resounded in its right place, with expressive powers in nuanced clarity and dramatic balance.

The L.A. Phil — which, incidentally, opens the next CAMA season, with Gustavo Dudamel in his final appearance here as music director — remains a model of symphonic excellence in the world, with a homebase a two-hour drive away. If we need to hear them in more adventure mode, as with last week’s Boulez moment, it’s a doable pilgrimage.