Shostakovich returns to L.A.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Shostakovich project is surfacing again, wheeling around to some of the mightier symphonic canvases.

The Symphony No. 4 is the road not taken for Shostakovich, a monumental sign of where his youthful radicalism was headed until Stalin cracked down. It bursts with wild ideas welded loosely together in a buckling one-hour structure, right down to an extraordinary, hopelessly desolate coda.

No longer a rarity, the Fourth has had an ample performance history in the Southland since Andre Previn broke the ice in 1989. The Philharmonic now schedules it every few years; Jorge Mester conducted it brilliantly twice with the Pasadena Symphony.

And Esa-Pekka Salonen’s turn Friday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was a very good first crack at it, forceful enough to give you the general idea.

Salonen clearly relishes the piece’s shock elements, laying into the dissonances, driving the first movement’s mad string and percussion assaults just about to their sonic limits.

Otherwise, he doesn’t interpret the work in an individual way yet, preferring to let it speak for itself, skimming over some of the satire and gloom. But his fine-tuned orchestra played it to the hilt, with savage brilliance.

Pianist Olli Mustonen is also a very talented composer of neo-classical music -- and one wonders whether his compositional bent contributed to his deconstruction of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3.

He was playing all the notes, but you could hear only those that he chose to underline; the others found his fingers touching the keys as if they were hot plates. As a result, Prokofiev’s lines of thought were distorted, his dynamics violated. Sure, it was different, but that doesn’t necessarily make it worthwhile.

At the pre-concert event, a foursome from the Philharmonic resumed the orchestra’s Shostakovich string quartet cycle with the Quartet No. 4, not the most immaculate rendition but one that grappled emotionally with the music’s substance.

Tonight, at the Gindi Auditorium, the Philharmonic chamber series offers Quartets Nos. 4, 5 and 6.