Last night I attended the first subscription concert of the season of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting.
With the wraps just removed earlier this week from the new concert organ at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, programming over the first few weeks of the season has been designed to show off this new addition to the serious music scene in Los Angeles. Mr. Todd Wilson was the guest organist on three of the four pieces played last night.
The concert began with Mr. Wilson alone, playing what is probably the best known piece of organ music ever written, Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. With Thursday's organ recital largely filled with unfamiliar works, it was nice to hear a piece I know inside and out and my initial impressions of the instrument's magnificence were validated.
Next up it was the orchestra alone, playing Mr. Leopold Stokowski's arrangement of Mr. Bach's Fugue in G minor ("Little.") Ironically, in contrast to the first piece on the program, this piece communicated how successfully the organ is able to convey an enormous array of orchestral colors.
Next up was Mr. Lou Harrison's Concerto for Organ, with Mr. Wilson as soloist. The orchestra in this piece consists solely of a percussion battery, requiring ten players and, beyond several of the percussion instruments typically played in a symphony orchestra, instruments such as a set of plumbers's pipes, a large rasp and a rattle. The two outer movements of this five-movement piece were just so much noise to my ears. I have never been a fan of keyboards being played with blocks (whereby several contiguous notes are played simultaneously), and there was plenty of it in those two movements. The three inner movements, however, did offer some nice lyricism and the unusual orchestral accompaniment did create some pleasant exotic effects.
Following the interval, the concert concluded with Mr. Camille Saint-Saens' Symphony No. 3 in C-sharp minor, more commonly known as his "Organ" Symphony. This was the first test of the balance between the new organ and the full orchestra, and it was a wild success. There are beautiful soft passages in the piece, and it concludes with a rousing coda. The cheering following the symphony's conclusion was loud and extended.
