L.A. PHIL WORKS FROM AN UNEVEN BLUEPRINT.

Byline: David Mermelstein Correspondent

Juxtapositions are tricky. You never know what refractions you'll get when you stand things against each other. Take Saturday night's Los Angeles Philharmonic concert, at which conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen unveiled a new work, ``Wing on Wing,'' written especially for the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Preceding it on the bill, which bore the double heading Creation Festival and Building Music, was another new work written for the hall, Liza Lim's ``Ecstatic Architecture,'' which had its premiere only a week before. And sandwiched between them was Iannis Xenakis' ``Metastaseis,'' written 50 years earlier.

Lim's roughly 25-minute piece was notable mostly for its rearrangement of the orchestra - the principal cellist sitting in the concertmaster's chair, cellos placed next to flutes, horns at the four corners of the orchestra - and some distorting of the instruments themselves. The score's title refers to works by architects like Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry, who designed Disney Hall, but the music sounded at first like an orchestra tuning up and then went vaguely exotic, with African and East Asian influences. Ultimately, a free-jazz quality, heavy on brass and percussion, dominated.

Xenakis, who died in 2001, was a structural engineer by training, so he knew how to make the most of materials. That philosophy found perfect musical expression in his ``Metastaseis,'' all seven minutes of it.

Wing on wing is a sailing term Gehry favors to describe Disney Hall. Now Salonen has used it for a 25-minute musical homage to both, employing large orchestral forces to make his points. And once again, this approach shows off the prowess of the orchestra he has built. The score is unquestionably Salonen's most accessible to date, but it feels ersatz - its fine-grained beauty almost cinematic, its watery allusions too indebted to Debussy. There is also the naked influence of John Adams and Stravinsky, and plenty of gimmickry.