When musical minimalism appeared in the mid-1960s, it was about process. It laid bare the grammar of music. Its repetitions allowed the audience to hear subtle changes over time, making it a more demotic style than the high modernism that preceded it. These repetitions could be maddening and their expression limited, but minimalism did grant a new form to American music. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed Bryce Dessner’s Violin Concerto on May 4, the orchestra took part in the style’s long evolution, showing how it has moved from focusing only on process to a more complex populism.
The LA Phil presented Dessner’s Violin Concerto under its much-loved former conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen with the violinist Pekka Kuusisto. The program also included Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. Like many in his generation, Dessner (born in 1976) learned from minimalism’s populist impulse—its tonality, rhythmic energy, and pulsation—but has followed other composers in expanding its expressive compass. For composers like Dessner, minimalism no longer binds itself to strict repetitions and has become a more mature language. What it gains in sophistication, it loses in transparency, which, to my mind, is a more than fair trade.
The Violin Concerto (2021) is full of frantic energy. Kuusisto delivered it with bravura, accentuating its restlessness. The concerto begins with open-string riffing on the violin in a motoric stream of notes and sustains this quick pace and texture throughout much of the work. The orchestra accompanies the violin with punctuated stabs from the strings and percussion and swells in the brass. The music makes much of a dance-like syncopation. Dessner doubles repeated, scale-like patterns across the orchestra, which, at times, felt overused. The violin relies on its open strings as drones while it sounds various motifs—a technique reminiscent of jhala, melody interpolated with strokes on the sitar’s high-pitched strings in Hindustani music, though it’s common in fiddling, too, which is likely what Dessner is after. Toward the end of the first movement, Kuusisto and the orchestra performed a kind of jig in which the meter was broken and syncopated. This jig-like section seemed misplaced in the piece, but it did offer some variation.
The cadenza forms a welcome contrast. It breaks the first movement’s relentlessness and gives the listener a moment of rest and introspection. Kuusisto’s sometimes lovely abstractions, full of quiet echoes and dramatic bow strokes, were like a memory of what had happened in the orchestra before. His solo formed a bridge into a second movement of slides and bending pitches, which proliferated among the orchestra’s strings, bells, and brass. The most arresting moment is a simple motif at the end of the movement. Here, the orchestra accompanies the solo violin with a cluster of gentle notes that drone and then pulse in the strings. This suggestive line has the mood of someone singing quietly to himself, unaware that anyone is listening. Kuusisto played these few unfolding notes with an attractive lyricism as the pulsations grew into the final section. If the cadenza was a memory, this moment was the concerto’s dream.
Salonen and the orchestra began the concert with Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, a piece sometimes pointed to as the beginning of modernism in music. It’s surprising that Debussy was once considered a rarefied taste. In the 1920s, the essayist Ortega y Gasset even called his music “dehumanized.” While this sounds like a damning critique, Ortega thought this a positive change from the excesses of Wagner and the late Romantics. Today, however, it is difficult to hear what he meant by it. The prelude is fragility and warmth made into music, full of invitation and subtle eroticism.
Salonen and the orchestra gave the audience a restrained and able invocation of Debussy’s daydreaming satyr. While Dessner’s orchestration could be harsh, with its piercing chords and percussion, Debussy’s was a lucid and refined blend of sound. At moments, though, the orchestra needed to allow the music to breathe. Harps, which are often buried by an orchestra’s mass, were pointed. The opening motif in the flute could have been more flexible: more at ease in the soft, dreamlike sounds provided by the score. These are small things, however. It was an entrancing performance.
If Debussy’s prelude marked the advent of musical modernism, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony gave us our first glimpse of Romanticism. While Ortega considered Debussy’s music exclusive to a cultivated audience, he thought democracy and Romanticism closely related. And it is true that democratic movements in Europe inspired Beethoven. He dedicated the symphony to Napoleon, only to destroy the dedication when Napoleon declared himself emperor. But the “Eroica” has as much of what Ortega called “high noon of the intellect” as the work of Debussy, if not more. Salonen and the orchestra showed great dynamic control and precision in the first movement. Salonen, too, set a disciplined tempo. He focused more on the symphony’s classical inheritance than on any excess of emotion. The orchestra took the second movement at a dignified tempo, emphasizing its tragic character. They gave the music a nobility of feeling that suggested it could have been the template for the grand Wagnerisms later in the century. It is, however, deeply reasoned music. Beethoven asks us to focus as much on his ideas as on their expression. As democratic as his political impulses may have been, the “Eroica” shares little of Dessner’s populism or Debussy’s sensuality. Artists have long had to contend with this balance between the demands of the craft and their audience. In this program, Salonen and the orchestra articulated three responses to one of art’s perennial problems: how much evolution, or even “dehumanization,” an audience will allow. But in 2025, with Dessner, Debussy, and Beethoven, we don’t hear populism, dehumanization, or revolution—we hear only music.
