Salonen’s fire sets tone for magical night

Thursday night, the Los Angeles Philharmonic program began with the most exciting performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 (the only exciting one, if truth be told) I’ve ever heard. Then came Matthias Goerne’s spellbinding performance of songs from Mahler’s “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (The Youth’s Magic Horn). If the audience was uncharacteristically noisy, this was the clamor of activity, not boredom -- the result of a bolt of electricity shot through Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The shooter was Esa-Pekka Salonen. And what probably helped animate the evening was a competition: Shostakovich versus Mahler. Mahler won, but the victory wasn’t as obvious as it might have been.

The Philharmonic is midway through its five-year Shostakovich plan, with three symphonies given a season. The current grouping, Nos. 7 through 9, is the war symphonies. Last week came the showy Seventh, which includes a musical depiction of the Germans storming St. Petersburg (a Nazi bolero, Leonard Bernstein quipped); next week will bring the epic Eighth, the people’s struggle. In 1945, Shostakovich promised a Russian Ninth, a lavish victory symphony with chorus and soloists, Beethovenian in scale. Stalin’s mouth watered.

Instead, Shostakovich gave Stalin a royal raspberry. Either the stupidest or the bravest symphony ever written, the Ninth is a snappy, sarcastic, neoclassical score less than half an hour long. At the Moscow premiere, the war-weary audience was glad for a little fun and loved it. The dictator called for the composer’s head.

How to approach the Ninth today? The most common way is to overplay the sarcasm. But then Shostakovich the Brave can easily seem Shostakovich the Stupid. To write a silly symphony is, after all, more an act of self-destructive rage than of useful subversion, and doing it can make a bully mad enough to silence your voice for a long while. (Lucky to escape Siberia or worse, Shostakovich didn’t dare write any more symphonies during Stalin’s lifetime.)

Salonen’s performance was not silly, nor was it sarcastic. It was fresh and vital. Salonen comes to Shostakovich with a sense of exploration. As he explained two years ago when he was about to embark on the 15-symphony cycle, he is the product of a Modernist generation that did not take the controversial Russian composer seriously. Pierre Boulez called Shostakovich warmed-over Mahler, and until the symphonies began to be heard as containing hidden anti-Stalinist narratives, that view was widely held.

Having never conducted these works, Salonen felt he needed to come to his own terms with Shostakovich. The cycle began famously, with Salonen exulting in the revolutionary fervor of the neglected pre-Stalin symphonies. The war symphonies, though, are evidently less to his taste. He decided to turn over the Eighth to David Zinman. Last week, he bowed out of the Seventh, his own music taking justifiable precedence. The deadline for his June Disney Hall piece looms.

If the high spirits of Thursday’s performances are any indication, though, work on Salonen’s “Wing on Wing” has gone well. Here Salonen basked in the Philharmonic’s virtuosity and turned the short symphony into an unlikely showpiece, full of rollicking rhythms and instrumental spice. The model was more Stravinsky, and maybe even Haydn. The cheers and whistles for the players at the end were like those at a rock concert.

There is little doubt that Shostakovich learned a great deal from Mahler about depicting the grotesque in music, to say nothing about how to exploit symphonic soul-searching, breast-beating and militant violence. But he didn’t warm over Mahler as much as zap those elements in an emotional microwave to tongue-blistering temperatures.

The Mahler “Wunderhorn” songs, on the other hand, are the work of a composer who had an incomparable facility for emotional nuance. Like Shostakovich in his Ninth, this is Mahler in a lighter mood, though not so light that he doesn’t, in his setting of German folk poetry, provide plenty of angst to go along with the humor.

Goerne did not so much sing the 11 songs as embrace them. Swinging his torso from side to side, raising and lowering his head, he was in continuous motion. He has a commanding baritone, his warm, flexible voice able to subtly shade a sweet melody or nail a listener with a dramatic outburst. He is a singer to watch as well as listen to, and the Philharmonic was mistaken not to raise the house lights enough so that the audience could quickly glance at the English translations of the German texts instead of having to strain.

But the orchestra needed no help being appreciated. Salonen had it playing with such vivid, arresting color in the Mahler that it evoked a whole world.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Today, 8 p.m.

Price: $15-$120

Contact: (323) 850-2000