GERMAN VISITORS : YOUTH ORCHESTRA AT BOWL

On the surface, it seemed like an ordinary concert Wednesday night at Hollywood Bowl.

Helicopters and other vile aerial intruders fought their usual winning battle with the lofty muses. An audience of 5,991 dabbled in conspicuously premature applause and competitive picnicking. An irate and/or distraught customer halfway up Cahuenga Pass contributed a brief basso obbligato of fortissimo epithets during a delicate pianissimo passage.

But this wasn’t an ordinary concert. This wasn’t the august Los Angeles Philharmonic doing its profitable summer thing.

The orchestra stationed beneath the gigantic acoustical balls resembled a motley collection of teen-agers. The casual players wore slacks and T-shirts. Those more formally inclined sported slacks and sport shirts.

After three massive excerpts from Henze’s “Ondine,” which opened the program, those orchestra members who would not be needed in the subsequent Paganini concerto strolled offstage to join the audience in the amphitheater, climbing onward and upward in a noble quest to experience culture, California-style.

After Gidon Kremer mustered the final flourish of the Paganini, the young women in the ensemble--a lot of young women--swooped down upon the violinist and buried him in a delirious heap of floral tributes.

This was the local debut of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, a.k.a. the Young German Philharmonic. A self-governing orchestra founded in 1974, it enlists the best talent from German academia and specializes in reasonable musical adventure.

At the Bowl, it sounded like a solid, well-schooled orchestra more notable for spirit than for finessse. Our vaunted amplification system--particularly tubby on this occasion--precluded certain judgments, however. It was difficult to tell if the choirs were really well balanced; and it was impossible to gauge whether the preponderance of thin textures and lightweight accents related to musical reality or to acoustical distortion.

In any case, one could admire the poise and flexibility of the playing. One also could recall more sophisticated, more powerful--and less costly--performances by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute Orchestra, not to mention our Debut Orchestra and the American Youth Symphony.

The conductor for the introductory tour by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie is a young Israeli, Yoav Talmi. He is serving as a late replacement for Gerd Albrecht, who has been seriously injured in a fall.

Talmi impressed with suave, authoritative, understated leadership, with sensitive accompaniment, and with sartorial splendor (he alone appeared in the usual white dinner jacket). He did not impress as an interpreter prone to deep, independent analysis. But he obviously commands ample taste and technique. There is time.

He sustained firm rhythmic impetus and a broad scale of coloristic devices in the neo-romantic music from Henze’s 1958 ballet--a suite oddly labeled “Trois Pas des Tritons.” He observed the inherent tensions and mustered emotive compulsion without gush in the Schumann Fourth Symphony.

In the seldom-heard Paganini Fourth Concerto, he provided attentive support and a neat orchestral framework for the virtuosic, somewhat eccentric Kremer. The Soviet emigre traversed the impossible stretches, slides, flights, filigree orgies and incidental explosions of this fiddling extravaganza with extraodinary skill, even with charm. He made it all sound pretty, and pretty easy.

He also went crazy at cadenza time, interpolating his own convoluted network of Schnittke-esque pianissimo glissandos and throb barrages and modern sound-effect explorations. The beguiling inventions had nothing to do, of course, with the music of Italy in 1832. This was music from outer space.

Or, at worst, spaced-out music.