Music : Kavakos Brings Fireworks to the Hollywood Bowl

The annual Tchaikovsky Spectacular at Hollywood Bowl is thoroughly familiar, and everyone knows what familiarity breeds. But over the years the beloved old pyromaniac’s delight has also created the cheering expectation of musical fireworks in the pre-intermission concerto spot.

Such anticipation was rewarded again in the latest enactment of the ritual, courtesy of young Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos. In his Bowl debut, he applied rousing sound, potent technique and an interpretation of occasionally disconcerting eccentricity to the Violin Concerto.

Kavakos began slowly, with the odd mixture of deliberation and dreamy eloquence that characterized his approach to the lyrical material. In the bravura conflagrations he proved technically precise, but his phrasing and bowing were sufficiently idiosyncratic to lose conductor Gerard Schwarz and the supporting Seattle Symphony at times in the first movement.

In all, Kavakos produced a big-sounding, emotionally engaging performance. Schwarz backed him with generally lithe, balanced and pertinently detailed accompaniment.

Schwarz and his visiting orchestra had to themselves the familiar charms of the Polonaise from “Eugene Onegin” and the “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy. The Polonaise danced blithely enough, and the ensemble’s lean, dark sound--illuminated by gleaming brass--and articulate rhythmicality projected much of the drama of the tone poem. But Schwarz somehow left “Romeo and Juliet” overall a prosaic, unconnected experience of surprisingly low energy.

In the increasingly anticlimactic “1812” Overture, Schwarz’s company was enlarged by the USC Trojan Band. The orchestra dispatched the introductory solemnities with minimal rhetoric, and the assembled throng accompanied the fireworks diligently.