Salonen's concerto makes itself at home

On Feb. 1, 2007, the New York Philharmonic premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen's Piano Concerto, his most ambitious orchestral score. The Big Apple's skeptical concert-goers and critics, proudly sporting their late-model flashiness detectors, responded with surprising (and evidently surprised) enthusiasm. The composer conducted. The orchestra, a very great ensemble in music it has played a million times, was impressive, barely over its head.

Yefim Bronfman, the herculean Russian pianist for whom the concerto was written, sweated bullets at the premiere and complained to any reporter who would listen about just how outrageously difficult the solo part was -- and how unfairly late the composer, a close friend, had been in delivering the finished score. No one took him seriously; he was a sensation.

Finally, 16 months later -- after further performances of the concerto by Salonen and Bronfman in London and Chicago -- E-P has called home. He and Bronfman offered a breathtaking account of the concerto to close the Los Angeles Philharmonic's program, the last of the season, Thursday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The concerto has not been universally lauded. Martin Bernheimer panned the premiere in the Financial Times, and the British critics followed his lead in their unanimous dismissal of the work as warmed-over Ravel and Rachmaninoff after it was played in the British capital at the Proms last summer (although a lot of cheers from the audience could be heard on the BBC broadcast). Chicago's response was apparently warm, not hot.

Finishing touch

The heat, however, was up in Disney. Deutsche Grammophon is on hand with dozens of microphones set up on stage to record the four performances of the concerto for CD. The Philharmonic, which is concluding six weeks of memorable concerts with Salonen, claims a prerogative when it comes to its music director's music. A Salonen orchestral score never seems quite finished until it has been played by the Philharmonic in Disney.

Thursday, this one was finished. The concerto has an elaborate structure that the composer describes in detail in his program notes. The instruments of the orchestra and the soloist are in intricate play for half an hour. Salonen suggests fanciful images of dancing machines and massive yet elegant animals. He writes that his working title for the lushly Romantic slow middle movement was "Synthetic Folk Music With Artificial Birds." Here, where he imagines a post-biological culture developing a kind of cybernetic Balkan folklore, is where others have seen the shameless synthesis of Rachmaninoff and Ravel.