MUSIC REVIEW : Klas Reveals a Primitive Part : The Los Angeles Philharmonic belatedly offers the West Coast premiere of Arvo Part’s 1964 First Symphony.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic mustered a belated West Coast premiere on Thursday, introducing a now-typically sparse subscription audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to a little symphony written back in 1964 by the now suddenly fashionable Arvo Part.

Essentially, this was a ponderous and dull concert in the hands of Eri Klas, a guest-routinier from Estonia previously engaged here for Hollywood Bowl outings and a UCLA run-out. Although the program also included some major Mahler and Dvorak, the Part part was easily the most interesting.

The Symphony No. 1, subtitled “Polyphonic,” doesn’t dabble in any of the mystical-minimalist mumbo-jumbo that has placed Part in company with Henryk-Mikolaj Gorecki as a pop-chart flavor-purveyor of the month. This is a souvenir of an earlier, less innocent era--an era in which the Estonian composer was still influenced by Schoenberg’s serialism and Stravinsky’s austerity.

It would stretch credibility to call the 15-minute, two-movement opus strikingly original. It is striking, however, in its brash rhythmic gestures, its bold dissonances, its grating textures and wispy melodic juxtapositions.

While Part--then 29 and cloistered behind an iron curtain--may have wanted to sound wild, his sense of order invariably made him sound mild. Everything in his compact symphony is neat, logically resolved. Musical t ‘s are crossed, i ‘s dotted, shocks avoided. The technique is terrific, but the primitivism remains predictable.

Klas bumped and thumped his way through his countryman’s music, his apparent enthusiasm tempered, one assumes, with stylistic authority. Still, one can imagine a subtler interpretation at one extreme, or a more passionate one at the other.

The conductor ended the evening with a rather thick and rough performance of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony and was rewarded with the usual push-button bravos. The Philharmonic can ride this warhorse to victory in its sleep, and sometimes appears to do just that.

The centerpiece involved the heartbreaking sentiment of Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.” The wayfarer’s songs could have broken few hearts on this occasion.

Klas concentrated on loud, fast and mushy generalities, instantly reducing the poetry to prose. In the process, he neither set proper moods nor provided ideal tempos for his conscientious soloist, Florence Quivar.

The mezzo-soprano sang with her customary warmth and opulence but brought little dynamic variety--much less tragic introspection--to the intimate texts. She might as well have been delivering arias.

The most successful contribution to this rather unsuccessful event came from Steven Johnson of Brigham Young University, who contributed scholarly yet perfectly accessible program notes. Something is dangerously wrong at the Philharmonic when the reading is more rewarding than the listening.