MUSIC REVIEW : A Varied L.A. Philharmonic Program at Pavilion

Squeezed in between Dorothy Chandler Pavilion concerts by major, touring orchestras from near and far, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s four performances this weekend achieve their own tightnesses. For his second program of the new season, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen has concocted main courses of Bartok and Lutoslawski, separated by two pieces of Debussy used as appetizer and entremet.

Unusual but, as heard at the first airing, Thursday night, viable. Generous but not long-winded. Debussy’s “Iberia” and petite suite of fragments from his incidental music for “Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien” provide color, lightness and distraction; Bartok’s Viola Concerto and Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony offer contrast and substance.

Given its world premiere by this orchestra, with the composer conducting, in February, the Fourth Symphony is a dazzler: It combines tautness of thought with emotional point, elegant rhetoric with unflagging invention. Its aural brilliance cannot mask a beautifully reasoned continuity, one never predictable, yet ever-expanding in sound parameters.

The performance, by a Philharmonic clearly engaged in this important second introduction to the work, offered technical polish and superior playing in all its facets.

Less of a showpiece and more of an essay in darkness, Bartok’s 5-decade-old Viola Concerto brought out the orchestra’s resources of color and shading in a handsome reading over which Salonen presided knowingly. Substituting on short notice for the indisposed Yuri Bashmet, Philharmonic principal Evan Wilson met all challenges to virtuosity and articulation eloquently and with warm projection.

More projection, however, in addition to clear textures and self-regulating balances, would have benefited the overall profiles of the demanding Debussy pieces. Except for providing contrast, however, one wondered what these quirky items were doing on this program, especially since, as good as they sounded, they didn’t produce much joy in the ear.

The final performance of this program takes place Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Meanwhile, the same program, with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony substituting for the Lutoslawski work, will be given today at 2:30 p.m. in the Pavilion.