An edifying argument

Musicians and architects look longingly at each other’s art form. Musical scores are described as having an “architecture,” while architecture has been called “frozen music.” But in the end, the notions of cathedrals of sound or the harmonic convergence of steel and space are little more than critics’ metaphors. Composers work with ephemeral sounds, architects build with physical materials; all else is talk.

Still, musicians cannot ignore their surroundings, and inspiration in any field can come from anywhere and take any form. The Los Angeles Philharmonic hopes the Walt Disney Concert Hall, by its design and its acoustics, will arouse creativity. And over the next week the orchestra, along with the Getty Research Institute, is examining how buildings have influenced music in a series of concerts and symposia called “Building Music.”

That it is a slippery subject was evident Friday night at Disney Hall, when the Philharmonic premiered Liza Lim’s “Ecstatic Architecture,” a “Building Music” commission. Whether discussing ecstasy or architecture, the young composer from Australia proved glib in conversation onstage with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and pedantic in her program note.

The actual points of architectural inspiration appear trivial -- she and architect Frank Gehry both draw squiggly lines sketching with pencil on paper; the auditorium is lined in wood, just like a cello. Her biggest concession to architecture was to redesign the orchestra’s seating plan, placing the violins behind the cellos, so that the cellos’ wood could commune with the Disney Douglas fir.

Lim does not write music that, at least on first hearing, strikes the ear as either architectural or ecstatic. It sounds instead like a symphony of stirrings. She produces an arsenal of unusual timbres, the winds blowing primal, bestial multiphonics, the strings producing halos of harmonics. The music begins restless, and a huge battery of percussion keeps it that way. I found little of interest in trying to follow a musical argument or structural design but became happily involved in the comings and goings of jungle-like rumbles and growls that continued for a quite a long time (25 minutes) but never got tiring.

Near the end, a trombone solo was a call to something exciting. The big climax, Lim writes, was ambitiously meant to fill every crevice of the hall and enter the body of the listener. It did, I thought, neither. But it was a brilliant, brightening moment of musical uplift nonetheless.

The performance was impressive, and so was the audience. Surely Gehry’s architecture, the presence of Mitsuko Uchida as soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19, and a Brahms symphony were all greater draws than difficult new music by a little-known Australian modernist. But Angelenos should pat themselves on the back. You won’t find many traditional symphony-goers anywhere else in America (except, perhaps, San Francisco) who will absorb and delight in the new as did Friday’s crowd. Could it be that one of the hall’s architectural achievements is to open the mind?

Once Lim had attuned the ear to visceral instrumental sounds, it was almost as if that life-force had entered into Uchida. Uchida’s Mozart is familiar; the Japanese pianist made her name with this composer. Even so, she brings Mozart so thoroughly to life that she never fails to astonish or surprise.

Elegantly outfitted in billowing white and constantly in motion with the music, she seemed, through her lissome playing, as if she could take flight any moment. The concerto belonged to her. But maybe it belonged too much to her. Salonen used a very small orchestra that sounded puny after Lim’s orchestral extravagances.

The Brahms Second was not puny. It is the most pastoral of Brahms’ symphonies, but Salonen, in keeping with the tone of the evening, took an aggressive approach that viewed nature as not always benign. The performance was rhythmically incisive and did not bog down. The sinewy sound, created in part by dividing the violins on either side of the conductor, meant that Brahms’ heavy orchestration never clogged.

But in this case, the muscle tone may have removed too much of Brahms’ fat. Salonen’s explication of Brahms’ ecstatic architecture replaced the creamy richness that lies at the heart of this symphony’s sound.