Icon and Iconoclast at the Philharmonic

If you’re anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare,

You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and the L.A. Philharmonic embarked on a little adventure Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Ever eager to court new audiences, always delighted to explore untrodden paths, our intrepid guardians of musical virtue offered a world premiere.

It wasn’t your everyday garden-variety premiere. Perish the ignoble thought. It was a much-ballyhooed commission presented in association with the vaunted Milanese orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala. The vehicle: a 24-minute something called “L’Ico^ne Paradoxale.” The composer: Gerard Grisey, 49, a Gallic avant-gardist who comes bearing credentials from the great Boulez School in Paris, a.k.a. IRCAM.

Salonen says, “Grisey is one of the leading composers of the so-called spectral movement.” That, the maestro explains, involves “music based on overtone series in an attempt to create a new harmony, an attempt to depart from the great mainstream of serial music.” Grisey himself uses such stimulating terms as “differential, liminal and transitory” to describe his expressive ideals and technical modus operandi.

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind.

The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of the transcendental kind.

“Music,” writes Grisey, “is the evolution of sounds, inhuman, cosmic, open to the fascination of the sacred and the unknown.” And that, dear reader, is just the beginning. “The spatial arrangement of ‘L’Ico^ne Paradoxale’ must render the time structures of the piece evident. . . . Even though they cannot be separated, time is not space and space is not time, and since we are unable to talk about time other than with visual metaphors, the whole discourse on time can lend itself to confusion.”

And everyone will say,

As you walk your mystic way,

“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,

Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”

The sentiments repeatedly italicized above were patiently penned by W.S. Gilbert in 1880. Rudely, they kept haunting the senses--at least some senses--during our introduction to Grisey’s paradoxical icon, which turns out to be a sonic ode to Piero della Francesca and his quattrocento fresco, “La Madonna del Parto.”

Salonen confronted the fierce complexities of the piece with a mammoth road map--or blueprint or guidebook or score--stacked in front of him. The unwieldy papers must have measured 5 by 5 feet. The devout out front, obviously attentive and potentially receptive, studied the program annotations carefully. The Philharmonic, splintered into unorthodox groupings, played with conscientious precision, or so it would seem. Two singers--Lucy Shelton and Janice Felty--floated overlapping, often-imitative nonsense syllables into the wide open spaces with virtuosic elan.

And how did it all sound?

It sounded oddly familiar.

Grisey’s means may be novel and his procedures may be forbidding. But his ends tend to suggest easy modernist cliches.

That doesn’t have to be taken as a negative judgment. Originality isn’t everything these days. One doesn’t have to memorize an eccentric cookbook to savor a conventional meal. Predictability still has a place in the scheme of things.

Any innocent listener could appreciate Grisey’s clever manipulation of sound clusters, his fine melding of instrumental and vocal timbres, his abstraction of lyrical impulses and delayed sense of crashing drama. “L’Ico^ne Paradoxale” actually dares to be subtle when it isn’t making a mighty noise.

The first hearing did not inspire an overwhelming desire for a second. For the intellectual minority this essay actually may be more compelling as music for the eyes than as music for the ears. Still, as the salesman’s widow so poignantly declared, “Attention must be paid.”

At the end of the performance, composer, conductor and soloists received polite applause. At least five enthusiasts mustered a standing ovation. A few auditors punctuated the applause with piercing whistles, unaware, perhaps, that Europeans equate this sort of response with booing.

Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band,

If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand.

*

The second half of the disjointed program should have appeased the disgruntled conservatives who survived the dissonant bath.

Radu Lupu served as gentle, mellow, sensitive soloist in a remarkably intimate performance of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. Unfortunately, Salonen tended to provide prosaic accompaniment for the poetic protagonist. The maestro made throbbing amends, however, in Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, vitalizing the composer’s meanderthal inclinations and ennobling his romantic excesses.

* Program to be repeated tonight at 8 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. $6-$58. (213) 850-2000.