Daniel Harding's First LA Phil Concerts Signal a Promising Future

Daniel Harding led the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 8, in his first concerts as music director-designate — and by one measure, at least, the occasion was already a success: for the first time this season, Walt Disney Concert Hall was nearly filled for an LA Phil subscription concert.

The local musical press turned out in force. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the orchestra's new creative director and its former music director, sat in the lower seats. Clearly, Los Angeles wanted a glimpse of its future under the 50-year-old British conductor, who leads a double life as a musician and as a pilot for Air France.

What does this change for the orchestra? On the evidence of Sunday, the immediate answer is attendance and attention. The program also offered another preview of the coming era: the first appearance this fall of the LA Phil's new concertmaster, Vineta Sareika, vigorously leading the first violins.

In a brief social-media video, Harding let slip that he would not have picked this particular program had he known these would be his inaugural concerts as designate. A big symphony, a massive choral work or a world premiere might have been the safer portentous choice. The concert became an event anyway.

What did the audience actually hear?

The program, billed as "Daniel Harding Leads Brahms & More," opened with Betsy Jolas's Latest (2021). Jolas, the French/American composer who turned 100 last August, is one of the last survivors of the generation that included Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Since Latest, she has published at least two more pieces.

The work's large orchestra, in the reviewer's description, "glitters, pokes, skitters, relaxes, pops, and generally moves like a turning kaleidoscope." Its language often carries an Anton Webern-like texture of sparse dissonances, though it is not a serial piece. The piece ends suddenly with the musicians chanting a single indecipherable word or grunt. Harding "mined the humor and let it burst forth."

Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 1, "Jeremiah," followed. Bernstein made four recordings of it, one on video — an intimidating precedent. Harding's rendition tended to channel Bernstein's view of the work in his last decade: slower tempos, a grander conception, still passionate. He felt the "surges and lay-down-the-law pomp" of the opening "Prophecy," drove the orchestra deeply into the "Profanation" scherzo with strong rhythms and a smashing coda, and took "Lamentation" patiently and smoothly. Mezzo-soprano Avery Amereau, in her LA Phil debut, drew blood with the unintelligible Hebrew text. The orchestra, in the reviewer's judgment, actually equaled the intensity of Bernstein's own performances.

The Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 completed the program. Harding painstakingly shaped each orchestral phrase and injected swaying momentum alongside the crisp but not-too-probing pianism of Leif Ove Andsnes. Principal cellist Robert deMaine's warmly expressive solos in the third movement were a high point. Brahmsian sprawl can easily lead to torpor; it did not this time.

What kind of conductor is Harding?

Moving gracefully and vigorously on the podium, he embraces big gestures and all sorts of micro-gestures that trigger responses from the players. In the tough contemporary work, he did not merely beat time — he seemed to have absorbed the work's content and used his technique to express his view of it. His unpretentious, humorous way of speaking to the audience reminded the reviewer of former LA Phil music director André Previn.

One concert, however encouraging, settles little. But as a prologue to the Harding–LA Phil partnership, this one looked and sounded, in the reviewer's understated verdict, "pretty good."