Calendar’s Summer Splash : Critic’s Choices : MUSIC AND DANCE

Summertime, and the music is sloppy. Sometimes. Somehow, it doesn’t matter too much at the Hollywood Bowl.

Beethoven and Brahms learned long ago to coexist with imperfect amplification, aeronautical intrusions, conspicuous picnickers, freeway noises and the joyful sound of empty wine bottles bouncing down concrete steps. Habitues approach Cahuenga Pass on a balmy summer night with their aesthetic expectations properly adjusted.

Predictably, the agenda this year looks predictable. Eleven weeks of sure-fire programs are to be embellished wherever possible with fireworks. However, big names will be in relatively short supply. After a week of modest throat-clearing exercises, the season opens officially on July 11. The inaugural accent will be Russian, as Yuri Temirkanov of Leningrad wields the baton in the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony. Vladimir Feltsman, a controversial Soviet emigre, plays the Beethoven Fourth Concerto.

Andre Previn was supposed to hold forth during the final weeks, beginning August 5. Who will replace the abruptly departed music-director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic remains a mystery.

Al-fresco music-making on a more intimate, more charming and more adventurous scale can be encountered at the Ojai Festival June 2-4. The heroes this year will be two composers: Pierre Boulez, who also conducts, and Gyorgy Ligeti.

Local opera lovers will have to content themselves with some wildly satirical operetta, as the Music Center presents 17 performances of Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” beginning June 14. The primary attraction of this British import could be the punchy cartoon designs of Gerald Scarfe.

The big event for dance lovers has to be the return of the suave yet mighty Kirov Ballet of Leningrad, a coup for the Orange County Performing Arts Center (August 18 to 27). The repertory is to include the seldom seen “Le Corsaire,” complete, plus yet another “Sleeping Beauty.”

Less tradition-bound terpsichoreans may find comfort in William Forsythe’s avant-gardish Frankfurt Ballet at the Wiltern in Mid Wilshire on June 6 and 7, or in San Diego on the 16th and 17th.