The Colburn Orchestra is very lucky. This conservatory ensemble has been able to gain experience under the guest leadership of a plethora of world-class conductors over its 21 seasons. Not only that, it has been able to play pretty much every major concert hall in the Los Angeles area, more so than any other local orchestra. A young musician can’t help but learn from all that experience.
Foremost among the regular visitors to the Colburn podium is Esa-Pekka Salonen, who directs the school’s Negaunee Conducting Program and occupies the Maestro Ernst H. Katz Chair of Conducting Studies.
In his latest appearance with the Colburn Orchestra, at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday afternoon, Oct. 26, it was Finnish time — mostly Jean Sibelius, as might be expected. But the program began with a brief, poignant remembrance of Salonen’s dear friend and onetime classmate at the Sibelius Academy, Kaija Saariaho, who died last year. The piece was Lumière et Pesanteur (Light and gravity), which Saariaho arranged for Salonen from a section of her oratorio La Passione de Simone.
Sure enough, the music shines like a light in the beginning before giving way to a lonely trumpet solo. Then, as the harp swoons and the sonic space is filled with relaxed note clusters, the piece exists in a fluid state of unreality, very much in the manner of Saariaho’s opera L’Amour de Loin. The work has a languid beauty that lingers beyond its mere six minutes, and Salonen, working without a baton, got the Colburn Orchestra to savor its textures.
Sibelius’s Violin Concerto was up next, entrusted to 22-year-old Japanese American instrumentalist Ray Ushikubo, whose ability to play at a professional level on both piano and violin brings to mind two-way baseball star Shohei Ohtani. It would be just the violin for Ushikubo here, of course, and he brandished it with a pure, thick tone quality, not much vibrato, sustained emotional legatos in the second movement, and just enough technical mastery to ride through the thorny traps that Sibelius sets in the finale.
There were times in the first movement when conductor and/or soloist slowed things way down at predictable spots — the twin passages of broken octaves, the cadenza. But mostly, Salonen kept up an urgent pace that suited the energies of his youthful players while not quite probing the dark shadings of the orchestral writing as he has done in recordings with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As an encore, Ushikubo added a shortened version of Nathan Milstein’s Paganiniana, a bewildering series of variations on Niccolò Paganini’s 24th Caprice.
Not for Salonen are the longeurs and disjointed structures that mar some present-day performances of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, the last piece on the program. He adopted vigorous, brisk tempos much of the way. This was a thoroughly unsentimental approach yet by no means a superficial one thanks to thoughtful shaping of phrases in the quieter passages and heroic statements. Even the slow second movement moved along with some urgency down the stretch.
One could call this a modernist approach, but at the same time, it’s a throwback to the way this and many other standard works were performed in the early middle years of the 20th century (if old recordings and contemporaneous timings are reliable guides). And while the furious string passages that open the third movement ran by in a blur and inner voices were not always clear in the finale, the Colburn musicians generally had this conception solidly in their grasp.
