MUSIC REVIEWS : MONTREAL SYMPHONY AT BOWL

In some ways, it was a typical evening at Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday. A midweek crowd of 9,287 trooped in to hear flashy orchestral standards and a hum-along Romantic concerto.

But if the notes were familiar, the faces weren’t. This was the second of four programs presented by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal in its Bowl debut, and the soloist was the young, monomial Japanese violinist Midori.

Ultimately, at least, the sounds proved distinctive as well. Closing the program was Stravinsky’s “Petrushka”--a raucous, exuberant, occasionally self-consciously brutal “Petrushka.” Working from memory, music director Charles Dutoit restored nose-thumbing, kinetic sass to a ballet that has become in many hands a prettified tone-poem.

The players responded with a lean, clean, uninhibited performance. They seemed to relish Stravinsky’s deliberate solo vulgarities as much as the driving passages for the full ensemble, bringing abundant color and zest to the 1911 version of the score.

Dutoit tried a similar approach to Richard Strauss’ “Don Juan,” another work that had been an iconoclastic revelation in its premiere. But what sounded so colorful and wonderfully impulsive in Stravinsky often appeared strident and harried in Strauss. “Petrushka” was largely given over to the winds and percussion, but “Don Juan” needed more depth from the strings and more expansive sentiment from Dutoit.

Whatever Midori--a diminutive 15-year-old who has been living and studying in this country since she was 10--may lack in names, she has in technical facility. She rippled through Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with airy ease, quickly covering minor lapses. Her interpretation, however, proved largely routine, from rhetorically inflated first movement to bouncing finale.