FROM BLUEGRASS TO DVORAK : MARATHON RAMBLES AT BOWL : Lukas Foss Returns for Philharmonic Fathers’ Revival of Musical Potpourri

Many, many years ago--back in the early half of the semi-sinful ‘70s--the ever-mod and ever-enterprising Los Angeles Philharmonic liked to sponsor marathon concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.

The musical endurance contests lasted up to six hours and attracted a big, youthful, devoted, almost cultish public.

The programs surveyed intimate chamber music as well as symphonic splendor, esoterica as well as Great Hits, in the wide open spaces of Cahuenga Pass.

The events always bore trendy unifying themes. The sprawling evenings could be devoted exclusively to Bach, say, or Mozart or the Baroque or Beethoven or Stravinsky or the 20th Century or even something broad and beguiling labeled “The All-American Dream.”

The resident hero-mastermind-hawker was that pianist-producer-composer-conductor-raconteur par excellence, Lukas Foss.

No one pretended that every minute of every marathon represented an artistic triumph. But nobody cared. Ticket prices were low, spirits were high, intentions were noble and the mood was emphatically amiable.

Eventually, the marathons went the way of the dodo bird. Or so we thought until Friday night. On the eve of national fireworks day, our dauntless Philharmonic fathers revived the old formula.

The orgy this time was called “An American Holiday Marathon.” Hyper-super-eclectic, it began at 6 and was supposed to end at 11. Good old Lukas Foss returned, though his role this time was somewhat diminished.

The audience--7,823 weak--was dominated by conspicuous picnickers and yapping yuppies rather than the more dedicated flower-persons of yore.

It was a happy crowd that made a lot of noise during much of the music, saved its greatest enthusiasm for jazz and barber-shop quartets and gospel songs, applauded during every orchestral pause and fled virtually en masse at the end of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. That was around 10:30 p.m.

Some bluegrass twanging was still in store, to say nothing of Morton Gould’s lengthy, well-dressed “Spirituals” and Copland’s inevitably climactic “Lincoln Portrait,” the last enlisting Esther Rolle as narrator. Never mind. Enough was enough.

It even was enough for your relatively faithful scribe. The evening had zigged and zagged from the casual to the profound, from the featherweight to the ponderous, from the flimsy to the portentous, from the popsy to the cutesy to the lofty. The senses were numb.

The musical menu had bumbled and jumbled too many cuisines. Aural indigestion had set in long ago.

Advance publicity had promised an air of informality. Members of the audience had been invited to “come and go as they liked.” At this marathon, however, the public was admonished (pretty much in vain) not to talk during the music. Unsmiling ushers dictated when entrances and exits were permissible. Meanwhile, the incoherently assembled music--an awful lot of this and an awful lot of that--went on and on.

And on and on and on. . . .

Here, in case you care, is what happened on July 3, 1987:

Ann Patterson and her big, brash, brassy, all-female jazz band--Maiden Voyage--opened the festivities with a 45-minute warm-up set. In context, it seemed a bit much of a loud thing.

Boyde Hood, Philharmonic trumpeter, led members of the Philharmonic Institute Orchestra in four fanfares, the most interesting of which turned out to be a peppery series of contrapuntal flourishes by Jean Hasse.

Three able institute fellows--Peter Rubardt, Peter Ioannou and Clyde Mitchell--took turns conducting the already excellent student orchestra in Charles Ives’ ear-stretching “Holidays” (1909). Foss, ever helpful, described the music as “strange and dreamlike.”

David Alan Miller, one of the Philharmonic assistant conductors, deftly accompanied a huffing-and-puffing virtuoso named Robert Bonfiglio in Henry Cowell’s surprisingly meek Harmonica Concerto (1962). The same conductor returned a little later to join the pianist Michael Zearott in a spiffy performance of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” variations.

After some slick and corny barber-shopping by a quartet called Variety, John Atkins attended to the pious baritonal kitsch of the “Simple Song” from Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass.” Gwendolyn Wyatt led the Holman United Methodist Church Choir in nine rousing gospel songs, after which Foss conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the eccentric gush of Richard Wagner’s “American Centennial March.”

For a gimmicky and gargantuan encore, Foss led the Philharmonic and the Institute orchestra, some 200 players in all, in an overwrought performance of Dvorak’s 9th.

This gave way to the hee-hawing of a bluegrass trio called Smokewood. By the time Foss got around to Morton Gould, exigencies of the clock forced the cancellation of four of the five spirituals for orchestra.

By 11:35, when the assembled throng finished the valedictory “Lincoln Portrait,” only the most stoic and devout, we are told, remained to cheer. It wasn’t a large crowd.

Perhaps the marathon is an idea whose time has gone.