Claiming ‘Rite’ as their own

Fifteen years ago, Sony Classical released a recording of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. Salonen had just turned 32 when the CD came out, and Robert Craft, the conductor closest to Stravinsky personally and musically, told me in an interview at the time that he thought this young man’s approach to the famous score was undeniably exciting, maybe even the way of the future -- but, of course, all wrong.

Well, the future has arrived. Salonen really got it wrong Thursday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall with a performance next to which the old CD positively pales, and I wish Craft had heard this “Rite” so magnificently, thrillingly, irresistibly wronged.

The score has become Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s signature Disney Hall tune. They opened the hall and closed the first season with it. They closed the second season with it in June. And this week, the “Rite” has returned for a special occasion. The orchestra is making the first live commercial recording in Disney.

At least that is what we are being told. Salonen asked indulgence from the audience: Don’t just turn the cellphones off, pull the batteries out. And in a year’s time, Deutsche Grammophon may well come out with this “Rite” on CD.

I, however, wonder whether those big trucks parked on 1st Street beside the hall contained something more insidious than mere recording equipment. Might they not be secretly testing the effect of Adrenalin (or something like it) by pumping it into the air vents? This was, Thursday, one very worked-up orchestra and one jackrabbit conductor. In Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which preceded the “Rite,” Lang Lang was all but jumping out of his dandified velvet suit. The energy all evening was simply palpable.

A word about Lang, whose performance was not for the recording, which will also contain Mussorgsky’s “St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain” (played Thursday and Friday) and Bartok’s “Miraculous Mandarin” Suite (to be played this afternoon and Sunday afternoon): This pianist is growing up. No longer the cute kid, he’s let his hair get long. He’s assumed a foppish look. But he’s toned down some of the mannerisms that were threatening to turn him into a self-parody.

More to the point, he sailed through Bartok’s demanding concerto with a marvelous technique that proved a show in itself. The concerto is not entirely his yet. He played from a score, and that meant he lost a dozen or so notes (out of thousands) turning a page during a furious run in the last movement. Sometimes he played so fast and fluently that he had no time to shape phrases, to bring out the intricate counterpoint. He could learn a thing or two from Maurizio Pollini about structure.

But he’s still in his early 20s, and it was great to hear him stretching rather than repeating yet again some Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky warhorse. Indeed, in his Bartok, the flare factor was so high, the combination of exuberance and accomplishment so engaging, that there was little cause for complaints. And his playing was so fast and so dazzling, who had time to think of any?

If Lang is, by nature, a daredevil, Salonen knew just how much to rein him in (which was only a little) and how much to let him have his head. Talk about all wrong. Bartok, an exactingly precise pianist himself, may well have hated even some of Lang’s toned-down showmanship and his tendency to sharply accent at places where Bartok didn’t ask for it. But I’ll bet he would have loved sitting in this hall with an audience enthralled, from first second to last, by his toughest piano concerto.

Still, Thursday ultimately belonged to the Philharmonic. The stakes are high with live recordings (although not that high, given that patch sessions are scheduled after Sunday’s matinee to fix any flubs). But obviously the band is proud of not just the way it can nail the “Rite” but the dimensionality of sound it brings to it, as well as to the colorful short Mussorgsky work that opened the program.

What might have once bothered Craft in Salonen’s approach -- when the young conductor, like Lang, took too much pleasure in showing the world what he could do -- is anything but a problem now. He has completely internalized Stravinsky’s pagan ballet, and the audience experiences the conductor and orchestra breathing as one.

Salonen’s is still not the diligent, self-effacing way Stravinsky (or Craft) conducted the “Rite.” Premiered in 1913, the piece is approaching 100, and to be kept fully alive it needs to sound like music of the moment. Thursday it did. With luck, the recording will capture that as well. But there is nothing like being there. You have two more chances.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

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

When: 2 p.m. today and Sunday

Price: $15 to $129

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com