Philharmonic’s afternoon delights

Vladimir Jurowski, the 30-year-old music director of Glyndebourne Opera, made an auspicious debut conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the first of the season’s six Friday afternoon concerts, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

A native of Moscow, Jurowski conducted a Russian program with great brilliance but a modest podium manner, right down to his attire: no coat, just a black shirt and slacks for this debut.

The climax of Jurowski’s two-work program was a highly detailed, intensely emotional revival of Tchaikovsky’s “Manfred” Symphony, a work that in some hands sprawls and loses focus. Not in Jurowski’s. His musical thinking, which he communicates effortlessly, embraces the entire work -- its changing moods, its excesses and the depths of the composer’s, and the hero’s, despair.

The orchestra, which opened the 2002-2003 season Oct. 3, demonstrated no second-week slump and played with a panache and a vigor not always easy to achieve at 1 o’clock in the afternoon.

Clearly, this conductor’s energy and musicality inspire his colleagues. They also inspired the usually undemonstrative, hard-to-impress Friday afternoon audience, which rose at the end. The first half of the program also kept the listener wide awake and in a mood to savor. Stravinsky’s irresistible divertimento -- actually a set of fragments -- from the ballet “The Fairy’s Kiss” demands an arsenal of instrumental colors, very often at the quiet end of the dynamic spectrum.

All the players responded to Jurowski’s realization of the composer’s nuances as well as his high points. Contributing strongly to the steady parade of charming solos were hornist William Lane, new principal cellist Peter Stumpf and clarinetist Lorin Levee.