CD review time!

Esa-Pekka Salonen is a well-respected conductor whom I have admired for a long time. He has produced a large number of recordings of modern and contemporary works with some really good bands like the London Sinfonietta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and I highly prize his recordings of the works of Witold Lutoslawski and Olivier Messiaen, among others. It turns out that he's also a composer at heart and this disk features Mr. Salonen conducting five of his own works with the L.A. Philharmonic, the group he's led with considerable artistic success as music director for some years.

The disk is Esa-Pekka Salonen's L.A. Variations, a nod to that long and successful tenure with the orchestra. The L.A. Variations is the largest work on the disk, which also includes a five-song cycle for soprano and orchestra, two works titled Giro and Gambit for orchestra and a feature for cellist and orchestra. The L.A. Philharmonic sounds great here, showing a lovely string sound and impeccable wind playing.

Mr. Salonen's compositions show skill, but don't exactly make my hair stand on end. He's generally not afraid of dissonance and the odd complicated voicing of multiple lines that thread their way through the Variations at times. The work seems to have this rather peculiar quality of seeming like the orchestra is speaking in a slightly too-loud voice, even during the softest passages. The voice work, Five Images After Sappho, features Dawn Upshaw singing. Her delivery mars the work slightly, as she sounds as if she's singing to very small children, exaggerating phrases and vowels at times in a mannered style. The melodies are pleasing, however and the orchestra parts remind me a great deal of the late Witold Lutoslawki's elegant writing. The remaining works on the disk are each melanges of episodic writing that struggle to hang together in a cohesive way, robbing them of drama or a feeling of motion. There are chattering, bucking rhythms, beautiful string writing and some fun tunes as well as shifty constructions of riffs, outbursts and other kinds of flash in the writing on this CD but overall, this is a minor treat.

6 out of 10

CDs listened to today:

• Konono No. 1: Congotronics
• Arild Plau: Concerto For Tuba And Strings
• Ludwig van Beethoven: The Piano Trios, disk 2
• Louis Armstrong: Volume VI: St. Louis Blues
• Esa-Pekka Salonen: L.A. Variations
• Bill Watrous: Manhattan Wildlife Refuge