MUSIC REVIEW

By John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune Music Critic

LOS ANGELES — Now that the red carpets have been rolled up, the paparazzi have dispersed and the euphoria of opening night has faded into history, a more sober evaluation of the new Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's architecturally stunning new home, is possible.

The Frank Gehry-designed landmark hosted its second sold-out gala concert over the weekend, a program of contemporary and 20th Century music titled "Living L.A." The dress code read "L.A. chic," and John Adams, the closest thing classical music has to a chic living composer, contributed a new work for the occasion, "The Dharma at Big Sur."

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But in fact the entire program, including pieces by Witold Lutoslawski, Silvestre Revueltas and the orchestra's music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, spoke to the keen appetite for new (and new-old) music Salonen has built into his orchestra and its audience. He gets inside the trickiest modern scores with the intellectual grasp of a composer combined with the technique of a virtuoso conductor. Unlike, say, the Chicago Symphony, his musicians actually seem to welcome the challenge of playing difficult or unfamiliar new scores. At Friday's concert they rose fearlessly to the rigors of each piece.

The program proved the best test so far of Yasuhisa Toyota's acoustical design, its strengths as well as weaknesses. As heard from one of the seating terraces behind the orchestra, the sound had both fullness and transparency of detail but was somewhat overbalanced in favor of the brass and percussion. The question that the two weekend concerts I heard did not answer is whether the room can deliver a warm midrange response to match its open clarity and vivid highs and lows.

Salonen's ingenious, exhilarating "LA Variations" -- a concerto for orchestra in all but name -- and Lutoslawski's starkly dramatic Cello Concerto -- one of the classic concertos of the late 20th Century -- felt perfectly at home in the dynamic hall. Ear and mind had no trouble processing their ricocheting rhythms and densely packed tutti chords dissolving into quieter instrumental activity. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma plunged into the concerto's battle of wills, pitted against an ensemble of secondary soloists who got to strut their stuff, ad libitum, thanks to the late Polish composer's "controlled chance" writing.

Beneath its oh-so-California title, the Adams work also is a concerto, this one tailored to the special talents of Tracy Silverman, he of the wild curls and even wilder electric violin. Silverman soared and scraped up a storm of bent-pitch arabesques over a huge orchestra that included two keyboard samplers, prerecorded tape and computer-controlled sound system.

But the piece was a major disappointment. The amplification made Silverman's fiddling grate on the ears for most of the score's 26 minutes, while the orchestral part -- a familiar post-minimalist wash of sustained string chords, percolating winds and pounding brass rising to a deafening crescendo in the final pages -- sounded like Adams coasting on autopilot.