Berlioz converts unite at Disney Hall

Berlioz is not a composer for whom love at first hearing is a common phenomenon. At first, he sounds aimless, maybe ignorant -- wrong notes, misleading harmonies, clumsy melodies and oafish orchestrations. Gradually, though, his music starts affecting you in funny ways. Melodies lodge in your head. A curious instrumental effect becomes something you seek out over and over because you can’t believe your ears. Eventually, it seems incredible that you didn’t always understand how Berlioz combined an elegant classicism and flamboyant romanticism into something remarkably inventive and individual.

Like many of us, Esa-Pekka Salonen once didn’t get it (Boulez is a Pierre-come-lately Berliozian as well). And even after his conversion, he still insisted that at least one major piece, “Harold in Italy,” was not very good.

But Thursday night at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, it was none other than “Harold” that Salonen conducted in the second of three programs in the orchestra’s Berlioz Festival. “Affectionate” may not be the first word that comes to mind to describe the exciting performance. But speaking as a Berlioz lover who is also less than entranced by “Harold,” I happily joined the Disney masses, captivated.

Berlioz used Byron’s poem “Childe Harold” as an inspiration to describe in music four scenes from 19th century Italian life. Moody Harold, the observer of mountaineers, lovers and brigands, is represented by a solo viola, making the score a unique hybrid between pictorial symphony and viola concerto.

The soloist on this occasion was a young player from California, Nokuthula Ngwenyama. She is a terrific player with a large, opulent tone. Few violists have big solo careers. But it shouldn’t be long before her difficult name (she is of mixed Zimbabwean and Japanese descent) is tripping off a lot of tongues in the classical music world. The contrast between the adamant orchestra and the rapt and unruffled Ngwenyama, who easily and always rose above it, was extraordinary.

Thursday’s program began with an animated account of the “Royal Hunt and Storm” music from the opera “The Trojans” but then offered a real rarity, “Tristia.” This odd little package of three miscellaneous short pieces for chorus and orchestra begins with an early setting of a Thomas Moore poem that is followed by two pieces connected to “Hamlet” -- a paraphrase of Ophelia’s death and a funeral march intended as incidental music for the end of the play.

The march is amazing, full of all those strange instrumental effects that make Berlioz Berlioz. Near the end, a musket is fired. You knew it was coming Thursday; the Philharmonic had placed a warning sign at the entrance of the hall. It was also hard to miss the player pointing a gun at the ceiling. Yet it startled nonetheless.

Indeed, it seemed to do more than startle, as medics ran into a side balcony after the shot. The Philharmonic reports the cause turned out to be nothing serious. But there was a tense moment. Disney is a hall in which concertgoers miss very little that happens on the stage or in the audience. But the Philharmonic’s electric playing and the USC Thornton Choral Artists’ impressive attentiveness to French inflection were excellent reasons to keep attention otherwise focused on the stage.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

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Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall,

111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Today, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.

Price: $35-$120

Contact: (323) 850-2000