MUSIC REVIEW : David Zinman Conducts Philharmonic at Bowl

Back after a week’s vacation, the Los Angeles Philharmonic sounded suitably refreshed Tuesday at Hollywood Bowl. David Zinman, music director of the Baltimore Symphony, led the orchestra in an evening of comfortable music-making.

The familiar rites of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” were not so much rethought as thoroughly dusted and polished. Working from memory and without a baton, Zinman encouraged a balanced, well-blended sound in service of an unexaggerated though supremely articulate interpretation.

All that was lacking was a final measure of passion, to give this pointed reading immediacy across the Bowl expanse. It was all very agreeable, but not terribly urgent.

The Philharmonic played for Zinman with limber, equable grace. Carolyn Hove spun out the English horn theme of the Largo as an elusive, soulful mystery.

Ronald Leonard, Philharmonic principal cellist, was the featured soloist for the occasion. He could not supply the sense of purposeful direction and shape that Lalo left out of his diffuse Concerto in D minor, but he did ennoble the rhetoric with sweet, focused sound and flew blithely over the technical hurdles.

Zinman and the orchestra backed Leonard with becoming and understandable modesty, given the musical throat-clearing and murmurs of the accompaniment.

The concert began, post National Anthem, with John Harbison’s “Remembering Gatsby.” Zinman and the Philharmonic treated it with seductive affection, finding the poignancy in this bit of fractured neo-Romantic nostalgia.

Attendence: 8,074.