‘MR. PREVIN COMES TO TOWN’ : TELEVISION DOCUMENTS THE BALLYHOOED DEBUT

“Mr. Previn Comes to Town” is the much-ballyhooed television show that documents, for a doubtlessly grateful posterity, the momentous arrival of a new music director at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Smiles. Sighs. Fanfares. Speeches. Applause. Fireworks.

Previn’s arrival obviously represents an occasion of profound historical and cultural significance. That, at any rate, is the message conveyed by the less-than-wholly-objective creators of this mildly amusing and shamelessly puffy endeavor: the Los Angeles Philharmonic and station KCET.

The show--directed by Robin Lough and produced by Stephen Dick--will be aired on KCET Channel 28 tonight at 8:05 (simulcast on KUSC, 91.5 FM) and repeated Sunday at 3 p.m. Channel 15 telecasts it tonight at 9, Channel 50 on Saturday at 7 p.m. In the final analysis, it resembles a viewer’s-digest extravaganza that tries desperately to telescope 10 weeks of footage into a single overcrowded hour. Potentially interesting problems merely are tossed and turned on a Procrustean bed.

There are some nice vignettes, to be sure. Near the beginning, our erudite, slightly befuddled hero applies considerable energy to the task of wiping his big, super-professorial specs.

“Here’s a shot for you,” he quips to the ubiquitous camera. “The conductor coming out of his dressing room, glasses streaked with dirt, mayonnaise and baby vomit.”

Much later, after the cameras have followed this chronically human protagonist through a maze of rehearsals, meetings, press conferences, testimonials and performances, the program builds to its delayed, all-embracing, bona fide climax: a visit to Disneyland.

The proud papa holds his somewhat bewildered 2-year-old son as a gigantic rodent proffers a greeting. “Some people live to shake Garbo’s hand,” Previn muses deadpan. “For others it is Picasso. We get Mickey Mouse.”

The viewers of “Mr. Previn Comes to Town” get their unfair share of Mickey Mouse, too. For openers, there are hasty, irrelevant, oddly edited snippets of the conductor at work in the wrong towns: Lichfield, England, and Vienna. Then, without so much as a pause or jet-propelled voice-over, the scene switches to Los Angeles, where the local devout apparently cannot wait for the second coming of the erstwhile movie-pop Wunderkind.

To say that the pace is hectic would belabor the ridiculous. Previn leads a merry chase through offices, rehearsal halls, strategy nooks and backstage crannies. The mundane preparations for the Great Debut are depicted in fleeting detail.

An unseen interviewer asks him questions in the back seat of a car as he is chauffeured through the byways of Los Angeles. Considerable attention is devoted to the street banners welcoming Previn and the T-shirts proclaiming his deathless bond with our orchestra. If anything, the maestro seems a bit bemused by all the fuss.

There is no narrator. The structure of the film aspires, no doubt, to free-flowing collage impressionism. When verbal illumination is imperative, the contrived cameras seek out Gail Eichenthal, the KUSC announcer, providing (re-creating?) the obligatory patter at Previn’s inaugural concert.

When it comes to the maestro’s own impromptu words, microphones catch a phrase here, a snippet of conversation there. Few thoughts are completed, few ideas developed. There simply is no time.

As if to compensate, the management has assembled a press kit containing quotable Previn quotes that must have fallen on the cutting room floor. The most revealing, perhaps, involves the boss’s response to the post-opening fireworks display that emblazoned his name, amid bizarre snaps, cracks and pops, in the gaudy sky above the Music Center Plaza.

“It’s wonderful,” Previn reportedly said, in a sentence deemed unworthy of inclusion in the documentary. “It’s so completely beyond taste that you really can’t criticize it.”

The last part of the judgment is, perhaps, debatable.

The musical portions of the program involve a few blasts of Ellen Zwilich’s “Celebration,” a few isolated bars of Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, and the thumping, crashing finale of the Prokofiev Fifth. Here, it might have been enlightening to concentrate upon the conductor, his technique, his means of shaping phrases and conveying interpretive ideas. For the most part, however, the cameras resort to the usual trivial evasions: close-ups of flutists’ fingers, clarinetists’ lips, violinists’ bows. . . .

Andre Previn proved long ago that he is an engaging television pedagogue. He knows how to talk about music. He knows how to make music interesting.

In “Mr. Previn Comes to Town,” he doesn’t get a chance to be engaging, to talk much, or even to make significant music. He merely serves as the subject of an innocuous, blurry, self-serving, super-speedy mini-portrait.