Happy Days for the L.A. Phil.

Alex Ross has a lovely New Yorker piece on Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final concerts with the L.A. Philharmonic after seventeen years at the helm. Ross describes the Finn as “soft-spoken” and “low-key,” a compelling image because it’s tough to rise to the top in classical music without a vigorous ego. “Most conductors depart in a blaze of fortissimo glory,” he writes, but “this one tried almost to steal away.” I like the way Ross fingers Salonen’s introversion as the source of a collective outpouring at the last performance:

That’s why the emotion welled up so strongly during the [fifteen-minute] ovation: it was time for the reluctant maestro to receive the lionization that was his due. Salonen kept dragging out his collaborators, until rhythmic clapping from the audience required that he take a solo bow. When he walked out alone, the Philharmonic brass players saluted him with a fanfare, and the violinists and violists…returned to the stage, some of the women holding flowers. It is exceedingly rare to see orchestral musicians exhibiting feelings onstage, especially feelings for conductors; the code of the profession demands a poker face under almost all circumstances. Salonen’s farewell forced a breakdown of the code, to the point that out-of-towners felt as if they were intruding on a private affair.

Among Salonen’s achievements was “presiding over the opening of Walt Disney Hall” — which gives me an excuse to continue my California travel journal, if only to ensure that my memories don’t get lost in the smog of time. On a sunny day (is there any other kind?) in downtown L.A., we explored the Philharmonic’s new home, Walt Disney Concert Hall, via self-guided audio tour — recommended if you can’t see a concert, as you’re left to wander through and on top of Frank Gehry’s building at your leisure, exposed to everything but the auditorium itself.

I visited and liked Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 1998. I thought it worked perfectly in its (cloudy, gray) context, even if the interior was more interesting than comfortable. But Disney Hall felt like a maturation. The most interesting factoid on the audio tour was that Gehry experimented with umpteen materials for the cladding, avoiding anything in brushed silvertone lest he appear to be photocopying the Guggenheim. Nothing clicked. Finally (as I recall), the client urged him to remove that constraint, and he found stainless steel the perfect solution. The tone is cooler than that of the Guggenheim’s titanium, but most eyes won’t notice the difference.

What’s different in Disney is the warmth of the interior. Bilbao is all whiteness, metal, and stone; Disney dapples the white in womblike strands of Douglas fir. Pillars, beams, and giant light vases thrust and glide through the lobby and toward the upper floors.

At night, the light vases (above, bottom left; below, top right) illuminate the fir and create teasing bursts of light in the windows for the benefit of those outside. Walkways and corners are sculpted at myriad angles so that, as in Bilbao, every step opens up a new vista.

For additional texture, Gehry covered the normally tedious contributors’ wall (which, notably, showed that he and his wife were top donors) with strips of industrial, slate-gray felt. The letters of the names, set in a smooth, specially designed sans-serif font, were tacked into the felt one by one.

I loved the hall’s carpet, also designed by Gehry in an abstract floral pattern. It totally nailed the balance of classic Modernism and contemporary splash, and, of course, added color to the otherwise neutral interior — something the Guggenheim lacks. I wish we could have seen the auditorium, with its funky organ pipes (off to the right, below) and wonderful in-the-round layout:

Critic Martin Filler, in his review of the new book Conversations with Frank Gehry, highlights Disney’s relationship to the orchestra’s old digs next door, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In the 1990s, power broker Chandler “sniffed” that Gehry would “not be considered” to design a new hall. “Alas,” Filler writes:

Chandler didn’t live long enough to witness the triumphant opening of Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003. …Gehry’s pitch-perfect auditorium and the voluptuous forms that envelop it consigned Chandler’s prissy sub-classical bandbox and its notoriously dead acoustics to the dustbin of architectural (and musical) history. Disney Hall furthermore proved that Bilbao was no fluke…

Chandler Pavilion is still used for opera and dance, and I’m confident that its New Formalist design will stand the test of time. But the excitement around Disney Hall is unmistakable, and I hope it eventually helps to revive its distinctly blah neighborhood.

As we drove around downtown, I noticed the city’s slick packaging of classical musicians: even chamber players were shown up close and attractive on giant, unmissable billboards, challenging motorists to think for at least one moment about string quartets. The use of personality was blatant, but there’s no doubting its effectiveness. When the young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel takes the baton this fall, L.A. will have a serious claim to be the hottest classical scene in the country.