Music Reviews : Stravinsky, Beethoven Program at Bowl

For a long time, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has specialized in the unique artifices of Stravinsky’s epochal “Sacre du Printemps.” Conductors great and small have led our orchestra through the complicated, kaleidoscopic score, some brusquely, others with almost irritating thoroughness.

Simon Rattle’s turn came Thursday in Hollywood Bowl, on a night when the ever-changing, outdoor sound-dispersal system seemed barely in use, the orchestra playing with minimal amplification.

Rattle, the Philharmonic’s nominal principal guest conductor (though he will be away from the orchestra, and this city, for the next year), seems squarely in the overkill school of “Sacre” conductors; he goes, not for the jugular, but for the corpuscles.

Consequently this performance, achieved by the Philharmonic players with all the care and completeness of researchers dissecting an artifact, had a patina of authority as well as of handsome detailing.

Orchestral choirs blended neatly yet with maximum definition; solo lines emerged fraught with conviction; purposefulness characterized the entire performance. Though it probably did not cause any of the 11,216 auditors in Cahuenga Pass to want to dance, the playing became, as a sound-document, easy to admire.

The other half of Rattle’s second and final Bowl program of this summer offered a coarse and blunt run-through of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a reading short on rhythmic bite and long on speed.

The dichotomy here was that, though Rattle’s tempos tended toward quickness and frenzy, they did not add to what we had thought was the built-in excitement of the work. In fact, all those fast tempos seemed to bolster a final impression more perfunctory than enlightening. In any case, the charms of the piece, its inevitability and its emotional mass, made only sporadic appearances.