PERLMAN PLAYS STRAVINSKY : SALONEN RUNS THE GAMUT WITH L.A. PHILHARMONIC

Esa-Pekka Salonen is almost indecently talented. Los Angeles has known that since 1984, when he made his unheralded American debut at the dewy age of 26. Now, even the rest of the country is taking notice. The young Finn must be doing something right.

Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he did just about everything right.

He chose an unhackneyed, stylistically varied, blessedly brief program, and conducted it with a complementary fusion of refinement and flamboyance.

He reminded us that the Los Angeles Philharmonic can be a bona fide virtuoso ensemble--all it needs is the right stimulation--and he played three difficult, disparate podium roles with conviction.

At the beginning, he cast himself as a master of chamber-music intimacy. At the end, he assumed the guise of a romantic gut-thumper. Between these extremes, collaborating with none less than Itzhak Perlman, he concentrated on the cool, intellectual pursuits that befit an enlightened 20th-Century accompanist.

In Haydn’s Symphony No. 99, which opened the program, Salonen sustained brisk tempos, transparent textures and, pervasively, a light touch. He explored subtle nuances, favored crisp accents.

Elegance triumphed. So did charm.

By closing the program with Scriabin’s “Poem of Ecstasy,” Salonen went from the sublime to the gargantuan. Without resorting to the orgasmic acrobatics favored by some conductors in this marvelously overwrought challenge, he scaled all the inherent emotional heights. The secret of his success lay in his careful respect for the inherent dynamic depths and in his obvious concern for cumulative tensions.

Salonen recognized only one climax in the work, and wended his way toward that super-whomper with restraint. En route, he savored fine instrumental detail, rhythmic precision and lush orchestral sonority. He saved the inevitable excess for the composer’s final indulgence, and, in the process, nearly managed to make the vulgar seem exquisite.

When it comes to Scriabin, that is no mean achievement.

The centerpiece of the concert took the complex and clever quasi-neoclassical form of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto.

Liberated, for a while, from the popular tyranny or romantic warhorses, Perlman played it with jaunty exuberance, lean tone and uncanny accuracy. He gave a suave, propulsive, splendidly poised performance.

Every impulse was crisply framed and deftly focused by Salonen and friends.

Thursday nights at the Music Center should always be like this.