MUSIC REVIEW : Easter Festival Triumph for L.A. Philharmonic : Esa-Pekka Salonen’s clever program receives cheers during concert series at Lucerne.

LUCERNE —  This city is used to hearing the great orchestras of the world, if not at Easter then certainly in its summer festival, which rivals Salzburg in that respect. The Easter Festival, which, like the Lucerne International Festival of Music, is directed by Matthias Bamert, is a relatively recent institution and a colder, wetter and more concentrated experience.

Tried out first in 1988, when the summer festival was about to celebrate its 50th anniversary, it met a setback in 1991, when the New York Philharmonic was unavoidably detained by the Persian Gulf War. It didn’t really get started until last year, when the London Symphony Orchestra was the major attraction.

Saturday, the Lucerne audience greeted the Los Angeles Philharmonic--the first in a projected future succession of American orchestras in Easter residence--with cheers and prolonged applause. Anyone tempted to dismiss that demonstration as a matter of politeness to visitors understands neither the sobriety of the Swiss nor the nature of the occasion: A note in the program, “Visitors are kindly requested to respect the formal character of the festival and dress accordingly,” just about sums it up.

The response to the first of the Philharmonic’s three concerts at the Kunsthaus Luzern was inspired partly by the actual performance and partly by Esa-Pekka Salonen’s cleverly constructed program.

Beginning with Haydn’s “Philosopher” Symphony--intended no doubt as an acknowledgment of the Easter situation in its church-sonata form and its chorale-based first movement--the agenda remained within strictly classical confines in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Then, after intermission, came the dramatic sensation of Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, a work that, though popular in Scandinavia and Britain, is unfamiliar here.

Anyone unprepared for the assault by side drum in the first part of the Nielsen symphony is likely to be stunned by it, particularly in the Salonen interpretation, which adds a theatrical dimension by having the drummer pick up his instrument and play it himself offstage, instead of handing over to a colleague behind the scenes.

It would be another underestimation of the performance, though, to attribute its success to stage management. The textural balance preserved throughout the excesses of the campaign was a rare achievement, and the detail of the more subtle percussion scoring was as interesting in its way as the splendidly sustained legato from the winds and upper strings when melody finally triumphed over alien and inimical rhythm.

It was clear from the start that this would be no ordinary performance. The thoughtful phrasing of the two bassoons in the opening bars was an immediate indication of that and, though the clarinet was apparently too sensitive to express the gritty quality of one of its solos, the woodwind playing was generally brilliant.

Even so, the glory of the orchestra must be its strings, which carry the weight to balance anything the winds and percussion can assemble and yet have the refinement for the precise coloring and linear clarity they achieved in the tricky contrapuntal passages in the second half of the Nielsen symphony.

Salonen’s structural economy, which reserved the most powerful orchestral impact for the end, was already evident in Haydn’s “Philosopher.” An essentially relaxed interpretation, it seemed concerned to offset an over-sweet string sound with the contrasting colors of the pairs of French and English horns, but apparently not to raise temperatures in any way.

Happily, German pianist Christian Zacharias had no ambition to exaggerate the dynamic or structural scale of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in B flat. Indeed, the concerto performance was as impressive an aspect of the concert as any, not only because it coincided so neatly with Salonen’s overall strategy, but because of the unfailingly close ensemble between the soloist and a conductor and orchestra with whom he had never worked before.

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Zacharias’ stylish and wittily understated playing earned him a Scarlatti encore, although the orchestra proved no less deserving for its flexibility in identifying so closely with the soloist’s concept of the work.

Any encore after Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony would have been an anticlimax, however. The same would obviously apply to Mahler’s Third Symphony, which was the lone item for the third concert of the series Monday. The occasion for the orchestra to indulge itself and the public would surely have been at the end of the second program Sunday, after Sibelius’ Four Legends.

There was certainly a demand for it. But, though Lynn Harrell offered an encore--a curiously distorted version of Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits”--after his performance of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, nothing was forthcoming from the orchestra.

That was all the more frustrating since, in the awkward Lucerne acoustic, Harrell’s playing sounded uncharacteristically thin, and the orchestral work was actually more interesting. Until Harrell’s deeply nostalgic account of the elegiac ending, the most accomplished and moving event was the principal horn’s subtly contrived entry with the lyrical second theme in the first movement.

There was a lovely English horn solo too in the third of the Sibelius Legends, “The Swan of Tuonela,” and Salonen conducted an uncommonly impassioned interpretation of “Lemminkainen and the Maidens of the Island.” In comparison with that erotic experience, the last movement stimulated no more than standard excitement, but it would have been a diplomatic gesture to repeat it even so.

Perhaps the best reward for all concerned would be an invitation to Salonen and the Philharmonic to return to Lucerne after the much-needed new concert hall is built in 1998.

Certainly any ensemble that can defeat the obstacles as comprehensively as they did in Mahler’s Third Symphony deserves that much gratification. The sopranos and altos of the Lucerne Festival Choir did not have the strength to penetrate (although the boy choir did), but apart from that--and an oversentimental account of “O Mensch” by the mezzo soloist, Birgitta Svenden--the performance was an enormous, overwhelming triumph.

Unlike Salonen’s Los Angeles interpretation, which, by all accounts, let everything loose in the first part, this one was based on a relatively restrained beginning, followed by delightfully characterized middle movements, and a finale adding yet another layer of intensity whenever it seemed that nothing more could possibly be held in reserve.

A few cracks were revealed in the brass facade but these were negligible faults in a performance few conductors and orchestras could even begin to emulate.