Esa-Pekka Salonen is music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and one of the outstanding conductors of today. He is also a composer — and composing, as we know, is the highest musical activity. Last week, Mr. Salonen guest-conducted the New York Philharmonic, premiering his latest work: a piano concerto (his first).

The concerto is in three movements, which Mr. Salonen has chosen to label Movement I, Movement II, and Movement III. He must have spent his creative energies on the music itself.

And what of that music? This work is like others Mr. Salonen has written, and it has much in common with today’s music at large. There is tons of percussion, rhythmic playing around, and busyness. You know contemporary music: busy busy busy. Mr. Salonen includes a perpetual-motion feel, and also a touch of minimalism (or certainly of repetition).

The piano enters in a jazzy, almost bluesy way, and the piano largely continues in that vein. You may think of a modern “Rhapsody in Blue,” or of the Bernstein mentality.

Mr. Salonen’s concerto is as much an orchestral piece as a piano piece, and the orchestra he uses is huge — humongous. Only the most generous of stages will do. And Mr. Salonen knows how to write for the orchestra he has amassed. It is pleasant, for example, to hear a sax rising from the din.

A quite special moment occurs when the concerto turns calm: We have a haunting, sweeping melody, and it is nearly cinematic. Mr. Salonen creates great spaciousness. This is gratifying.

But mainly, he throws notes at you — waves and waves of notes — and he threatens drowning. I have mentioned the “busyness” of this work; you might also call it diarrheic. It is hard to discern a structure, to distinguish one part of the score from another. The concerto can seem so much noise, or so many musical doodles. Mr. Salonen achieves some nice effects with his waves of sound — shimmerings, for example.

But, oh, that busyness! That fire hose of notes! I have sometimes observed that Liszt writes as though paid by the note; the same might be said of Mr. Salonen. When listening to the third movement, I thought of a man wagging a finger in your face, making the same point over and over. I wanted to say, “I get it.”

Piano and orchestra end the concerto in a blaze of notes — very exciting. But then, virtually the entire concerto has been a blaze of notes.

The soloist was Yefim Bronfman, with whom Mr. Salonen has often collaborated. The composer dedicated his concerto to Mr. Bronfman. And, on Friday night, this magnificent pianist was brilliant and unstoppable. The piano part is terrifically hard — although nothing is terrifically hard for Mr. Bronfman. Liszt himself would be defeated in trying to trip him up.

Elsewhere in the program, Mr. Salonen led the Philharmonic in Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin” and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” orchestrated by Ravel.

In the former piece, what do we want, ideally? Clarity, sparkle, and tastefulness. Mr. Salonen and the orchestra provided these, though not in sufficient degrees. Throughout the four sections, Mr. Salonen was fast, and often rushed. The music lost its essential nature, and the playing was none too neat.

That lovely Forlane was rather brusque, and missing its slightly tipsy charm. And in the Menuet, where was the minuetty grace? The Rigaudon, which closes the suite, was properly energetic, but not properly musical. It was borderline rude. Nobody asks for drawingroom daintiness in Ravel’s tribute to the French Baroque; but musical composure is demanded.

And the suite can sometimes resemble an oboe concerto: Liang Wang, the Philharmonic’s new principal (new this season), did satisfactorily.

Like “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” “Pictures at an Exhibition” was rather rushed through, and bulled through, without sufficient musicality. You might have thought that Mr. Salonen was tired of the piece, and wanted to get it over with — he sort of thrashed it to death. Many of the sections, or pictures, lacked their special character. The mystery of the Old Castle, the delight of the kids playing in the Tuileries, the majesty of the Great Gate — these were present, sure, because Mussorgsky wrote them in. But they were inadequately brought out.

As for the Philharmonic, they were at times dazzlingly virtuosic, as they can be; and they also laid eggs (and not just in the Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells).

Avery Fisher Hall’s audience, bless them, went nuts over the whole evening.