De Waart leads Phil in retro John Adams

The conductor works magic on ‘Chairman Dances,’ an early work by composer.

John Adams’ presence in Disney Hall the past couple of weeks continued Thursday, as there was a sense of a circle closing. Adams’ advocate for the night was none other than Edo de Waart, the conductor who put Adams on the musical map.

De Waart leads the Milwaukee and New Zealand symphonies, but when he was the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, he made Adams — then a little-known, wild-eyed young music teacher at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music — his new music advisor and later, the orchestra’s composer-in-residence. De Waart made one recording after another of Adams’ early breakthrough pieces such as “Shaker Loops,” “Harmonium,” “Harmonielehre,” and “Nixon in China” that spread the composer’s name around the world.

“The Chairman Dances,” another Adams piece that De Waart recorded first, has since achieved standard repertoire status. Hearing the Los Angeles Philharmonic play it Thursday in the wake of its performances of “Scheherazade.2” last week was a jolting reminder of how far Adams has traveled in the past 30 years. (The Thursday program will repeat Saturday and Sunday.)

Heard against the complexity of texture, exotic orchestrations and portentous intent in a lot of Adams’ recent output, “The Chairman Dances” seems almost nostalgic, with its minimalist engines chugging away and the irreverent intrusion of easy-listening, Gordon Jenkins-style string harmonies near the center. De Waart still knows how to make it move and groove, right down to the tapered-off percussion workout at the end, and he now brings out more crystalline detail and curvaceous phrasing in the winds. It was a journey back to a time when today’s maximalist was still working his way out of minimalism.

Later on, Behzod Abduraimov, the young Uzbek pianist who has made a big splash in L.A. by substituting twice on short notice in virtuoso Russian concertos, returned to Disney Concert Hall with something entirely different, the Saint-Saëns Second Piano Concerto.

Rocking back and forth on the piano bench to the rhythms of his playing, Abduraimov attacked the opening cadenza with the vehemence that he might have unleashed upon Russian works. Mostly, though, this performance was notable for less-flashy things — his wonderfully floating thirds in the long, mostly slow opening movement, his light touch and witty subtleties in the tuneful scherzo and the precise little trills in the finale. Balances between the pianist and orchestra were on the dot.

Using pretty much the same smallish orchestra as in the first half of the program but with a fifth French horn added, De Waart closed the evening with a mostly routine performance of Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony of medium-thick textures and middle-road tempos. It was only modestly rousing toward the end. No runs, no hits, no errors.

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