Music and Dance Reviews : Miller Conducts Mozart at Hollywood Bowl

Maybe it’s all those pops concerts devoted to Gershwin, et al., but some evenings at Hollywood Bowl seem to define themselves in song titles. Friday it was “Summertime,” “The Way We Were” and “Roll Out the Bottle.”

Preview week at the Bowl is a period of fine-tuning for staff and audience: getting the trouser cuffs of those new Ralph Lauren uniforms rolled just right, finding the psychologically most devastating moment to set a bottle bouncing in a Mozart slow movement.

The orchestra, however, is often in good form, fresh from vacation and unworn by the grueling Bowl schedule. That seemed the case Friday, as David Alan Miller led a scaled-down Los Angeles Philharmonic in a generally crisply and sprightly played Mozart program.

Miller’s approach to the quirky single-movement Symphony No. 32, K. 318, and the Symphony No. 39, K. 543, was direct and even brusque at times. Little inclined to linger, he drove the music purposefully if not eloquently.

His orchestra sounded alert and balanced, though at least one fiddler consistently went against the ensemble grain in the appoggiaturas in No. 39.

The soloist also tended to go his own way. Jean-Pierre Rampal produced some blurry, uneven articulation and rushed ahead within phrases in songful accounts of the Flute Concerto No. 1 and two short works. His own cadenzas proved effusive within a brief span.

Rampal’s waywardness was accentuated by amplification that put him on another plane from the orchestra. Within that eccentric context, Miller accompanied as tidily as possible.