Music and Dance : Josefowicz, Miller in Bowl Finale

That’s it. It’s over. Another Hollywood Bowl season come and gone. And, once again, associate conductor David Alan Miller led the Philharmonic through the thick and thin of the fireworks finale.

The remarkable 12-year-old violinist Leila Josefowicz, in her Philharmonic debut, provided the musical apex to the evening, however, with a commanding performance of the seldom-heard Violin Concerto No. 5 by Henri Vieuxtemps (last performed by this orchestra with a similarly aged and talented Ruggiero Ricci in 1932). Josefowicz handled its considerable technical demands with assured bravura, its lyricism with a mature elegance and flexibility. She showed a keen understanding of the music’s dramatic rhetoric and gave it shape, not by rote, but through spontaneous declamation.

Miller opened the Friday concert (repeated and televised live Saturday) with a bright and agile reading of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. Later, he led a brash, brassy and percussive account of Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story.” Despite its spirit, however, it remained mostly an above-the-waist affair.

Handel’s “Royal Fireworks Music” capped the evening, with Miller conducting what looked like every oboist and bassoonist in the county (along with a battery of trumpets, horns, timpani and side drums) in a vibrantly buzzing, pointedly contrasted reading--at least until the fireworks began in earnest. The 17,966 in attendance ooohed and aaahed; the Air Quality Management District’s response was probably less enthusiastic.