Music review: Los Angeles Philharmonic festival ends with Adès and Messiaen

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Aspects of Adès” ended Saturday night with 128 musicians plus  Thomas Adès, who conducted, on the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The clarinet section alone was 10 strong, ranging from a pair of squealing wee minis in E-flat to the oversize double bass, which burbles like a deep-sea diver excitedly discovering gold. The percussionists, also 10, set up shop with a hypnotic sonic menagerie, including gongs (high and low), bells, tam-tams, wood blocks and whip.

The piece was Olivier Messiaen’s “Éclairs sur l’Au-delà…” (Visions From the Beyond…), the French composer’s last piece, completed shortly before his death in 1992. This was the orchestra’s first performance of the 65-minute, 11-movement ode to divinity and the aviary, and it was overdue. Although it was commissioned by Zubin Mehta for the 150th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic, Mehta had developed a close relationship with Messiaen during the conductor’s L.A. Philharmonic years, so we get also get a crumb of credit for the birth of a masterpiece.

Beyond that, a vision of the beyond was about the only place left for Adès to go after putting together four ambitious  programs, with plenty that was earthly and secular, and for which he served as composer, conductor and pianist. There was so much difficult new music to learn that I heard tales from musicians of sore lips and fried brains.

But “Éclairs” got a confident, impressive performance. And before it Saturday came the Los Angeles premiere of Adès' latest orchestra piece, “Polaris,” a smaller vision of the beyond. It was written for the opening of the New World Center in Miami Beach in January. The L.A. Philharmonic is a co-commissioner, along with the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and others.

The Miami Beach premiere took advantage of an auditorium designed by Frank Gehry as a video haven. Grandly sloping curved white walls jut out over the stage like sails and are intended for projecting images. “Polaris,” which is subtitled “Voyage for Orchestra,” comes with a video by Tal Rosner.

Adès’ score is a friendly complication. Airy melodic lines in winds and strings and brass are incandescently lit  by the high-wattage sparkle of piano, two harps, celeste, glockenspiel and plenty more percussion. Three times these lines dip into the glitter, and three times they emerge magnificent.

Rosner’s video on three screens begins and ends with animated abstraction. For the main part, two women, shot from different angles, sit near a shore. Something makes them moody. In Miami, the surf looked breathtaking, simply because everything projected in the immersive hall looks breathtaking. Letterboxed, on a single screen in Disney, Rosner’s video became insignificant and extraneous.

But even more annoying was that the screen remained after intermission, ugly in front of the organ pipes, taking away Disney's visually breathtaking vista that would have been the perfect vision for Messiaen’s visions.

Still, Adès’ conducting was spacious, as it was for “Polaris.” But if his “Polaris” performance didn’t have quite the pop that Michael Tilson Thomas gave it for the premiere, Adès met all of Messiaen's huge technical demands in "Éclairs." He balanced huge forces with clarity, and he revealed a sheer delight in Messiaen’s fetishes for birds (the songs of nearly 50 species find their chirping way into the piece) and spiritual ecstasy.

Indeed, Adès once experimented with musical depiction of Ecstasy, the drug, in his orchestral score “Asyla.” And here he showed that maybe ecstasy is ecstasy, however you choose to absorb it. Messiaen’s visions came from “The Book of Revelations” and other sacred sources, but they also were tied into still other passions: for the rhythmic patterns of Hindu music and his passion for passion -- the love music handed over to the strings is luscious.

And so the brass played their chorales with beautiful, burnished tones. The flutes were birds let out of their cages. The strings trilled with such intensity that they sent clouds of overtones wafting through the hall -- and maybe beyond.

Not everyone is a fan, though. At the New York premiere in 1992, many in the audience rudely walked out during the performance. I’d like to report that Los Angeles is different. It is in that far fewer left Saturday, and those who did did so respectfully between movements. An older couple in front of me exited just as the love music was about to begin. I felt sad for them.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic spared no expense for this concert. What it got for its money was sweetness, somberness, rapture and bliss. Those more eager for Elgar and Tchaikovsky, come back this week and next.

 
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Thomas Adès in all his aspects

-- Mark Swed

Photo: The premiere of Thomas Adès' "Polaris" at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times.

 

Comments

[w1n5t0n]

I enjoyed the Ades piece a lot, but agree that the video was not helpful nor needed in Disney Hall.

However, I thought the Phil played the Messiaen sloppily, but considering that the massive forces must have been underrehearsed for this final one-night-stand of the gargantuan piece, I guess we should be grateful that they all finished together. Despite the shaky execution, I still enjoyed hearing Éclairs live for the first time.

I was apparently sitting further back in the auditorium than the reviewer, because several couples did leave at different points mid-music in the Messiaen. They left reasonably quietly, but still, such behavior just makes me shake my head. Get half a clue, people.

[Charlie]

Too bad you wasted your time with all the china smashing in LA. "Trouble in Tahiti" at the Santa Barbara Opera was the musical highlight of the weekend. No review in the LA Times.

[Leland Bard]

Ah, w1n5ton, I think you would have heard the precision of the conducting & execution if you had had scores for the works, or the advantage of a seat in Orchestra View, facing Ades -- I had the latter. Both works have complex and irregular rhythms and the Messiaen has plenty of ad lib passages - cadenzas so to speak for lyrebird and the 47 other species represented... From my seat, for "Eclairs," Ades conducted with exactitude & clarity, and the forces of 128 were right with him, except for a very few tentative entrances in the brass. The strings were sensual, delicate, and yielding in all the right ways in movements 5 and 11 - that sounded naughty, eh, but that's what Messiaen wrote! Ades was a genius of mime in cuing the entrances for ad lib birdsong in movement 9 - Clarinet 5! Flute 4! Clarinet 2! Clarinet 1! Brilliant. Review suggests "Polaris" is wafty and slight, but it's forceful, rich, plenty brawny.

[lapm]

This reviewer mentioned the number of clarinetists and percussionists on stage but said absolutely nothing of the fact that there were ten flutists performing in the Messiaen, as well, and they were arguably the most prominent section in all those super-complicated aviary movements. By the way, the program was not over-rehearsed for sure, but the only moments of so-called "sloppiness" and "tentative entrances" in the concert occurred in one of the most challenging aviary parts near the middle of the piece when the conductor apparently lost a bit of concentration for a minute or two (quite understandable considering the four extremely demanding programs he led during the fortnight) and made a couple of technical conducting mistakes - this is not the kind of music that can be played with impeccable cleanliness when the person on the podium is not perfectly clear and precise. Other than that, the performance by the orchestra in the Messiaen was virtually spotless.