Music Review : Slatkin Conducts Orchestras at Bowl

Clearly, there was more going on than met the ear. Clearly, we were meant to feel something noble, our souls stirring to music, the universal language, perhaps.

At Hollywood Bowl Sunday night, Americans played Russian music. Russians played American music with Americans. The words of Martin Luther King Jr. resounded in the night air. And then the two orchestras combined in that colossal monument to love, Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique.” Sound a little heavy-handed? It was.

But it wouldn’t have mattered much if things had been in better musical order. But under the baton of Leonard Slatkin, the American Soviet Youth Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute Orchestra achieved only sporadically the level of musical polish that could have raised this evening above just routine business.

The main event on the first half of the program was Joseph Schwantner’s “New Morning for the World” (“Daybreak of Freedom”), performed by the American Soviet Orchestra with James Earl Jones narrating words taken from King’s writings.

This is the kind of music that, bypassing the mind, is supposed to go straight to the heart. But the work reaches no catharsis. It takes little account of King’s unique rhetoric, and despite the noblest of intentions, Schwantner never reaches the level of King’s words; his music seems mere posturing.

Jones read the text with his usual authority and conviction. Slatkin led a somewhat scrappy account of the music that nevertheless got the ideas clearly across.

Earlier, as a substitution for the U.S. premiere of a new work by Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke, the “Russian Easter Overture” by Rimsky-Korsakov received an unsettled, inconsistently miked run-through by the Institute Orchestra under Slatkin.

After intermission the orchestras combined for the “Symphonie fantastique.” Slatkin managed to get a big, richly voiced performance from his strings, but many a detail went by the wayside. He conducted straight through the rhythmic intricacies this score abounds in, not bothering to clarify them. Textures proved consistently thick and woodwind parts subdued. The most important music in the last two movements seemed to belong to the bass drums, cymbals and timpani. Berlioz wrote a more interesting piece than this.

Before the concert the orchestras intoned both the Soviet and American national anthems. Afterward, a Russian, then an American, encore. Attendance: 9,248.