Music Reviews : Fireworks, After All, in Bowl Season Finales

The weather added a new ingredient to the well-tried rites of the Fireworks Finale weekend at Hollywood Bowl--suspense.

Friday, before Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks,” an announcer informed the throng of 17,963 that the fire marshal might forbid the pyrotechnical display, should the wind be in the wrong quarter.

When the flags began stiffening out in the wind during the third movement, there was an almost palpable feeling of resignation. So then the launching of the fireworks, on a musical cue old hands all know, was actually something of a surprise this time.

Otherwise, it was season close-out business as usual. Heiichiro Ohyama led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a grainy account of two of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, and a sonically and emotionally more potent reading of Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy. An enlarged wind band tootled brightly and stylistically eccentrically under his brisk urgings in the Handel.

Soloist for the occasion was Emile Naoumoff in the Grieg Piano Concerto. His was an overtly interpreted account, elaborate and exaggerated. The feeling of calculation and control where spontaneity and drive are needed did not advance the composer’s cause.

Naoumoff may have been disconcerted by the buzzing of something that had fallen into the bass strings of the piano, necesitating a visit from the piano technician after the first movement. The pianist did glance out at the audience several times when bottles were dropped, and had to contend with the clinking of the wind-whipped flag lines and an unusual amount of street noise, held in by the weather conditions.

Ohyama and the orchestra supported him in equally dry, fastidious accompaniment.

FOOTNOTE: Rain shortened the program at Saturday night’s fireworks finale. The fireworks did take place, although “Music for the Royal Fireworks” was shortened to accommodate.