From the off-kilter, the sublime

As a perfect visual complement to Berlioz’s “L’Enfance du Christ” -- the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s marvelous Christmas present to its listeners this year -- the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was a little off Friday afternoon. A festive row of wreaths was set at the foot of the orchestra, but it wasn’t even. With a harp in the way, one wreath was plopped down lower than the others.

Likewise, Berlioz’s slightly screwy oratorio is a series of tableaux -- each a telling, almost cinematic scene from the childhood of Christ -- that doesn’t quite line up. And it is in the not quite lining up, the almost constant thwarting of expectations, that the Christmas story glows with a halcyon sublimity perhaps unique in all of music.

The first thwarted expectation is that there is very little divine in this “sacred trilogy.” The oratorio is divided into “Herod’s Dream,” “The Flight Into Egypt” and “The Arrival at Sais.” At the beginning, a narrator singing in chant-like declamation tells us only that a newborn Jesus lies in his manger, not yet singled out by heaven. At the end of the oratorio, the narrator returns, again with but little inflection, to tell that the child, when grown, will open a path of salvation.

In between, with Jesus as a gentle prop and the help of the occasional hovering angel, Berlioz searches for the source of simple human goodness. Herod’s tyranny is a perversion of his own inner desire for the peace denied kings. Joseph and Mary are less anointed guardians than typical loving, anxious parents.

The warmest, most giving music of all is that of the Ishmaelite father who shows hospitality to the holy family. The Ishmaelites’ stress-reducer is a little light music from a pair of flutes and a harp. And rather than any biblical miracle, it is this gorgeous diversion near the oratorio’s end, this touching, modest moment of familial peace, that leads to one of the most beatific choruses in all music.

This is strange, beautiful music, full of quirky sonorities, and the Philharmonic’s playing under Esa-Pekka Salonen was well controlled, sometimes exquisite. It is a piece that Salonen still needs to grow into; his approach was straight-ahead, shapely and, when appropriate, dramatic, but not yet personal. The instrumental trio was sumptuously played by flutists Anne Diener Zentner and Catherine Ransom and harpist Lou Anne Neill.

The Los Angeles Master Chorale did nearly everything right. It doesn’t have that nasal French sound that gives Berlioz’s vocal music its pungency, but the sheer mystical ardor of it singing in the quiet a cappella closing chorus was heart-stopping.

The vocal soloists were a slightly off-kilter quartet but effective. Tenor Vinson Cole’s operatic approach to the narrator’s chant-like lines proved surprisingly moving. Next to the outstanding, elegant baritone, Gilles Cachemaille, who was Herod and the Ishmaelite father, the mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer and baritone Nmon Ford could not help but seem overwrought as Mary and Joseph.

Next December will be Berlioz’s 200th birthday, and the Philharmonic will be celebrating the Berlioz bicentennial extensively when it moves into the Walt Disney Concert Hall next season. Given how well this “L’Enfance du Christ” sonically illuminated the acoustically dull old Pavilion, the stage is well set. I even hope the skewered flower arrangement might become tradition.