MUSIC REVIEW : A Traditional Bowl Opening

Gone are the days--or so it seems--when conspicuous consumption and wasteful party-giving were the order of the night at festivities opening the summer season at Hollywood Bowl.

Last year, Bowl management announced the discontinuance of the then-traditional launching of colored balloons into the night sky on opening night “because of dangers to the ecology and the environment.”

And long before that, the lavish, pretentious and overwrought food entertainments we archly called picnics-at-the-Bowl were deemed unfashionable, and became obsolete. Fit, not fat, remains the current ideal. In Cahuenga Pass, there is still a lot of food on the premises, but the groaning boards of yore are seen less frequently.

Some things do not change, however. The pops programs at the Bowl, to some a noble tradition lo these seven decades, go on. And on. For opening night at the 69th Hollywood Bowl season Tuesday, that tradition prevailed.

Glinka’s Overture to “Russlan and Ludmilla,” the First Piano Concerto of Tchaikovsky and Brahms’ Second Symphony made up this program, conducted vividly by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, the veteran, Polish-born musician long active on our shores.

American pianist Andre Watts, playing with his usual panache on an apparently underpowered Yamaha piano, was the soloist. The once-prodigal Watts is now 44, and has become a Schubert player (among other of his specialties) to be reckoned with, but he continues to bring an adolescent enthusiasm to all his assignments.

On Tuesday, Watts seemed to lack the ultimate authority one expects in this particular, familiar piece. (He returns to the Bowl tonight to play Saint Saens’ second concerto.)

He brought wonderful delicacy to the quieter parts of the opening movement, and did so even earlier in its progress than many of his colleagues do--terrific lightness to the whiz-bangs midway through the Andantino, and plenty of speed and accuracy to the climactic finale.

He did not, however, take one’s breath away in building up the long climb ending in the first-movement cadenza, or make that extended solo passage cathartic. Hampered perhaps by an instrument probably incapable of wide-ranging sound projection, as well as by climatic conditions that gave the orchestra an acoustical edge, Watts failed to make the slow movement sing convincingly, or even very audibly.

And, in the finale, for all his virtuosity, the pianist did not produce the kind of musical weight and substance to bring this piece to a resounding conclusion. On the contrary: In the final pages of the work, the piano sounded tinny.

High-humidity conditions in the Bowl may partially explain the orchestra/soloist imbalance; it certainly can be blamed for the inconsistency of sound made by the Philharmonic throughout the concerto.

Earlier, after a majestic National Anthem, Skrowaczewski led a risky, high-speed run-through of the Glinka overture, one that became truly admirable only when it was over and no lives had been sacrificed. Our orchestra gamely went along with the conductor on this one.

And it also gave him its best in Brahms’ Second. For all his principal focus on the dramatic movement of the work, Skrowaczewski and the Philharmonic produced a remarkably mellow, long-limbed reading, one alive with details yet seldom overstated.

All the solo lines emerged inseparable parts of the total musical fabric--led by William Lane, the horns made beauteous, expressive and touching contributions, for instance--and the whole was illuminated by an effortless integrity. As they appeared, each phrase, section and movement inevitably seemed to belong to the cumulative thought, not to an independent statement. To serious musicians, making sense of Brahms remains a continuing challenge; when one of them succeeds, the rest of us ought to be grateful.