On Sunday afternoon, principal guest conductor Susanna Mälkki began her last concert of the season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Steve Reich’s “Runner. ” Thanks to the L. A. Marathon, it was a day of runners. Reich, though, is not one of them. In a video discussing his 2016 piece for winds, percussion and strings, the composer, who turned 85 last month, said his exercise choice is the treadmill and bicycle; the title came to him out of nowhere. Reich resisted the name at first. But it stuck because of the performers’ need for pacing in the roughly 15-minute score. Not that this unparalleled master of pulse has ever written a piece that doesn’t need serious pacing — the astonishing rhythmic intricacies in Reich’s music require spectacular counting. I don’t seem to be such a hot runner either. Stuck in marathon-triggered traffic, I arrived at Walt Disney Concert Hall seemingly just in time. But I lost the race by seconds, reaching the door to my aisle just as it closed. There were compensations. For one thing, Nonesuch Records recorded the weekend’s two performances for an album scheduled for release in spring 2022. Another was the fascination of watching “Runner” on the lobby monitor while hearing the sound of the orchestra bleeding through the hall’s closed doors and mixing in with more distant sounds of traffic outside. I know “Runner” through broadcasts of its first performances in Europe (premiering as the score for a dance choreographed by Wayne McGregor for the Royal Ballet). But in this case, not being able to hear the details very well made the push-pull of modulating meters and tempos a physical sensation that overpowered the aural one, like runners more attuned to their heartbeats than the ambient sounds around them (other than maybe rhythmic cheering). Funnily enough, after having run up the stairs and heard it this way, “Runner” indeed became more about running than passively listening, at least without the dance component. Still, there was never any doubt that John Adams’ Violin Concerto with Leila Josefowicz as soloist was the main attraction. The concerto, which proved an instant sensation at its premiere in 1994 in Minneapolis and reached the L. Phil three years later, is already a modern classic widely performed. Moreover, hardly a year has gone by during the last three decades when the orchestra hasn’t programmed something by Adams, who has been the L. Phil creative chair since 2009. For her part, Josefowicz has played Adams’ concerto well over 100 times and has recorded it. Josefowicz, a MacArthur Fellow, has absorbed it like no other violinist. As a longtime member of the L. Phil extended family, she is the inevitable go-to violinist when the orchestra is in need of a daring, probing, thinking, dancing, spectacularly virtuosic soloist. Composers including Adams (in his latest epic concerto, “Scheherazade. 2"), Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kaija Saariaho and many others jockey to write for her.


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