As always, it was the underground hit "Dunger Tealeaves," a mod-rocking one-up on the Mission: Impossible theme, that got a few fists pumping. To see their faces, you'd have thought that some of the lingering Stintson faithful had mistakenly swallowed a cattle grub. (Chuck Mindenhall)
L.A. PHILHARMONIC
at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, May 19
With a big, colorful bang, the Phil ended its season by presenting the Los Angeles premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen's Foreign Bodies, an extravagant piece for large forces in which the composer revels in the possibilities of absolute orchestral sound. From its opening giant blasts of brass, strings and tympani, into flurries of woodwinds awash in shimmering chimes, Salonen crafts a sprawling, thumping, episodic event whose descents into the maelstrom are reminiscent of the Bernard Herrmann/Mahler noir-drama in the Hitchcock films (lots of very heavy double-bass in this one), a wide-ranging bag of menace, thrills and opulence that breezes into diaphanous balletic motifs then airy climes even like that of Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite. It's a highly visual piece, set in four movements, revisiting and rhythmically compounding dancelike flourishes as Salonen struts his excellent gift for taking the sweeping sheen of romantic orchestral music's past and extrapolating via ingenious (and tasteful) harmonic maneuvers (as in his L.A. Variations, there are some great chords in this piece). Exciting stuff -- you feel your blood racing when the orchestra, amid the wild emotional fray, finally has a nervous breakdown, pulls itself together when called by a distant, strange organ, then hits its climax of screaming strings, bells and tootling brass, a gripping effect not totally unlike rinsing off with Janet Leigh. Boom! It ends, and the crowd goes nuts.
With Foreign Bodies Salonen achieves an accessible yet modern "serious music" equation that shrewdly pushes the parameters. At the Music Center, the piece owed much of its impact to the almost brutish physicality of the score and its performance by the Phil, which gave it a gleaming, dynamically chic recital, and punchy, not stodgy. Of course, that physical vitality is something Salonen as a conductor is especially good at; his fluid yet superprecise movements at the podium are as much fun to watch as the music is to hear. Even so, Salonen had some kind of cheek to present his own piece on this weighty program (capped by a majestic performance of Tchaikovsky's slightly exhausting Symphony No. 4 in F minor), with the formidable Yefim Bronfman attacking the rather insane athleticisms of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor. Bronfman, a charismatic bear of a man, works hard for money; his lithe tickling, stabbing, crisscrossing and caressing wizardry in this hair-raising and very modern-sounding work brought deserved thunderous applause. (John Payne)
