WOLFF, MUSTONEN AT BOWL WITH L.A. PHILHARMONIC

Promising, if inauspicious, debuts were the order of the evening at Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic opened its 10th and final week of the 1987 summer season in Cahuenga Pass. Making first appearances with the orchestra were young American conductor Hugh Wolff and the 20-year-old Olli Mustonen, a pianist and composer from Finland.

But the program at least reacquainted us with old friends: Beethoven’s Third “Leonore” Overture, the Piano Concerto of Edvard Grieg and Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps.” All were performed attentively, if without maximum heat, by the Philharmonic, efficiently guided by Wolff, the 33-year-old music director of the New Jersey Symphony and a conductor whose professional career is now eight years old.

Wolff dealt carefully with Stravinsky’s pagan mural, displaying more caution than impetuosity, more honesty than fire.

“Sacre” is of course a great showpiece for the orchestra, and the players of this ensemble gave a good show. What a conductor needs to add is a sense of scenario, of musical goals pursued and attained; these Wolff only indicated, and tentatively.

Pianist Mustonen attacked the beginning of Grieg’s cherishable concerto with such violence and apparent passion that it took some moments before one realized he was not playing it very well.

The Finnish musician seems to produce a shallow and metallic tone at the instrument; his chordal passages came out unbalanced, a sense of line seldom materialized, and most of this reading emerged awkward and edgy. In the finale, Mustonen’s aggressiveness endeared him to some in the friendly audience of 8,694 gathered here--if not to lovers of Grieg.