MUSIC REVIEW / L.A. FESTIVAL : Salute Captures Energy of Festival

“A Salute to the Los Angeles Festival” at the Hollywood Bowl Thursday evening proved in many ways a paradigm for the festival, of which it was a part.

The premiere of a silent color film by festival director Peter Sellars, updating “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and inspired by John Adams’ “Harmonielehre,” dropped off the program almost as soon as it was announced.

As a replacement, Sellars served up the original silent classic, and preserved “Harmonielehre”--played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by David Alan Miller--as the accompaniment.

Through the drastic, musically destructive expedient of repeating the first movement of “Harmonielehre” between the second and third, Sellars made sight and sound fit, at least loosely. He also had to tinker with the pacing of the film.

The music, however, suffered. German Expressionism is the tie that binds here, but reduction to accompaniment brought the mechanistic elements in “Harmonielehre” to the fore, and the radical restructuring made no more sense than would repeating the first movement of the “Eroica,” for example, after the Funeral March.

Miller and Co. did not advance the cause with their often imprecise performance. Brass and percussion parts came through with pertinent vigor, but many of the strings seemed to settle for rough approximations.

Eleanor Academia-Magda’s explanation of the ensemble from her World Kulintang Institute touched on some of the same ideas that Adams expressed in the printed program, and the music had clear links to minimalism.

The five-member ensemble from the Reseda-based institute gave a lively, awkwardly amplified introduction to the kulintang , sort of a Philippine gamelan . Like gamelan , the kulintang seems to have two primary, intervallicaly spicy melodic modes, each requiring a different set of gongs. The short, unannounced pieces on this survey were largely up-tempo numbers, delivered in keenly articulated rhythmic layers with flair and precision.

With a traditionally oriented and carefully paced powerhouse gospel set, the F.A.M.E. Freedom Choir gave yet another dimension to harmony.

Led by Joe Westmoreland--with the spirited assistance of Rickey Grundy and Charles May, and a dynamic, often incomprehensible set of soloists featuring the fiercely soaring male soprano of Dwayne Knox--the chorus provided full, unfettered vocalism.