Guest conductor Ryan Bancroft and the Los Angeles Philharmonic began their rare, Saturday afternoon concert with the US premiere of Anders Hillborg’s Sound Atlas, perhaps a gesture toward Bancroft's role as Chief Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Written in 2018, this 20-minute soundscape reflects the composer's curiosity about how synthetic textures can be built using natural, acoustic instruments. The five sections – Crystalline, River of Glass, Vaporised Toy Pianos, Vortex and Hymn – introduce a wide palette of color: a glass harmonica, microtonal string harmonies, eerie pipings and gleaming, blended sonorities that seem to evolve and recombine in slow, tectonic motion.
The music progresses according to lines so immaculately constructed that the piece could serve as the soundtrack to an imaginary diorama. Rather than asserting themselves, the musicians and their instruments become part of the sound design, dissolving into the textures they create as they merge into the fabric of the music. One especially striking outburst of percussion seemed caught between violence, sunlight and deep ice. A series of meditative singing bowls brought the piece to a contemplative close.
Bancroft took Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 24 in C minor at a brisk pace, emphasizing its martial rhythms and the striking angularity of the opening theme. Yeol Eum Son played with poise and technical fluency, even if her interpretation leaned more toward clarity than expressivity; there was less phrasing in relief, but the transparency of her tone was compelling in its own right.
As the performance unfolded, the music began to take on the feel of a symphony with obbligato piano – elegant, fleet and lightly voiced. Son unfolded the cadenza in broad gestures, emotionally reserved but noble in tone, with what sounded like a few chords from The Magic Flute folded in. The Larghetto was lovely: the pulse relaxed slightly, and Son added delicate, tasteful ornaments that gave the music a touch of bloom. In the finale, she gradually expanded her expressive range with increasingly florid, Hummel-like elaborations, more and more daring with each repetition. If it never felt entirely headlong, it was certainly gaining momentum by the end.
After intermission, Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony began with surging physicality and admirable sonic heft. The cello solo's burnished tone on his C and G strings helped set the tone for a performance that was both generously phrased and alert to detail. Bancroft seemed attuned to the tensions in Nielsen’s musical language – the push and pull between late-Romantic richness and stark, modern clarity. One had the impression of hearing the composer sorting through his influences in real time, the orchestra channeling his process as much as his product.
As is occasionally the case, a trumpet player inserting earplugs just before the dueling timpanists launched into action in the finale was a signal that they were going to be very loud, and so they were, although not without a sort of kettledrum poetry. Still, not everything landed. The woodwinds in the Poco allegretto were smooth but not rustic enough, and the strings lacked a hair-raising, Hitchcockian thrill in their big Poco adagio entry. Overall, the performance had more determination than sweep and glory.
