You can’t accuse the Los Angeles Philharmonic of underselling itself. Any orchestra that kicks off a three-day residency with a programme that includes Edgard Varèse’s riotous Amériques alongside a Shostakovich symphony, with the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as an encore, is counting on making an impression. But while the loudest moments lacked nothing, it took conductor Gustavo Dudamel until well into the second half – the slow movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5 – to draw out quiet playing of anything like the same intensity.
That the orchestra’s expressive range seemed curtailed wasn’t a problem in the first half, which was all Technicolor anyway. It opened with the European premiere of Pollux by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Dudamel’s predecessor as the LA Phil’s music director. A feast of many-layered strings, it sounded dense and sweet; occasionally there was the addition of a weighty bassline, and when a glockenspiel pinged out high above, it could have been John Adams at quarter-speed. Salonen plans a partner piece, Castor, depicting Zeus’s other twin son; for now, Pollux remains an abstract work, its seething, intriguing textures let down by a slightly pedestrian peroration towards the end.
Amériques is a kind of urban Rite of Spring – imagine not the ice cracking, but the Manhattan tarmac. Varèse had been at the scandalous Paris premiere of The Rite only a few years earlier, and he boldly peppers his score, not only with glancing references to Stravinsky but with the alarm call of a wailing siren, which sounded rather measured – no freewheeling cop show sound-effects here. Otherwise, the orchestra played the piece for all it was worth, achieving a floor-shaking depth of sound, with Dudamel keeping things taut and tense.
The Shostakovich, rightly, had the slow movement as its beating heart. The rest, though, tended towards bluntness, with phrasing that got the music from A to B without much nuance. The Wagner sounded luscious but felt foursquare. Perhaps the rest of the orchestra’s residency, which closes with Beethoven’s Ninth but otherwise focuses on new music and youth work, will play more consistently to Dudamel’s strengths.
• At Barbican, London, 3 and 4 May. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
