WATTS OPENS BOWL SEASON

Officially, the 64th Hollywood Bowl season began Tuesday night, with all the traditional components of a so-called opening night in Cahuenga Pass: lavish picnics, hundreds of balloons released into the summer sky and outdoor music provided by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Predictable ritual is what Hollywood Bowl is all about, and this ritual could not fail to please those who dote upon such things. But as the start to a summer season, it was anticlimactic.

After all, the appearance Tuesday of conductor Leonard Slatkin and pianist Andre Watts in a program of music by William Schuman, Saint-Saens and Dvorak lacked the imagination--not to mention the seriousness--shown in four preseason concerts conducted by Helmuth Rilling and Esa-Pekka Salonen last week.

Nevertheless, this was, as expected, a festive occasion. The Philharmonic rose to it with attentive, alert and very nearly immaculate performances of Schuman’s “American Festival” Overture, the Second Piano Concerto of Saint-Saens and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Slatkin conducted with his usual authority. And Watts, as always, displayed his trademark virtuosity and musical effectiveness.

As did Salonen last week, Slatkin surprised some listeners at the beginning of the evening with a quick, rather crass reading of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one which not only rushed to its conclusion but also ignored the natural flow of the text. Longtime Bowl-watchers remember more appropriate, and more hymnlike, approaches to our national anthem.

After that, the 41-year-old conductor made more defensible musical choices. He seemed to elicit maximal energy and clarity from our Philharmonic in the Schuman piece, and in Dvorak’s most popular symphonic canvas he tended well to both motivic urgency and lyric expansion, with cherishable results. In solo assignments, all resident principals gave strong accounts of those familiar and touching melodies.

Watts’ stylish reading of Saint-Saens’ G-minor Concerto emerged appropriately songful and soulful in the opening movement, playful and light in the Allegretto scherzando and runaway-bold in the finale. Slatkin and the Philharmonic remained close in every sense.

Official attendance: 10,772.