Mozart Minifestival Opens at the Bowl

Amazingly, this celebratory year marking the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death seems so far to have produced very few performances of the composer’s second-level works, those pleasantries existing below the musical plateau of his masterpieces.

But it had to happen. This week, a couple of those middling compositions turned up in Hollywood Bowl, of all places, giving a perspective sorely needed in this festive year.

Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich, an American musician who’s been a resident of the United Kingdom for more than three decades, returned to the Bowl Tuesday night to lead a contingent of fewer than 50 Los Angeles Philharmonic players in the first of four Mozart programs constituting an August minifestival. For our delectation, the pianist-conductor offered an agenda contrasting great works with merely functional ones.

Or at least so they seemed on this occasion.

The Adagio in E, K. 261, and Rondo in C, K. 272, both for violin and orchestra, and the Piano Concerto in A, K. 414, which we used to call No. 12, are not compositions for which anyone need apologize, but they do reside on a lower shelf of Mozartean achievement than many others we are hearing in 1991.

There are reasons to program them, of course, as when flutist Anne Diener Giles played the Rondo on a preseason Bowl event last summer and made it seem not only resplendent, but irresistible. Apparently, it really isn’t. Violinist Michele Bovyer--another member of the Philharmonic, making a solo appearance Tuesday--brought to it, and to the Adagio, low-voltage energy and workaday insights.

Then, at the piano, conductor Bishop-Kovacevich could not rescue the A-major Concerto from its longueurs-- especially in the pedestrian finale--even though his effortless, purling playing and well-modulated, handsome tone gave it its Mozartean elegance. Unlike some, he balanced his roles as leader and soloist deftly, proving comfortable in both.

As last year, when he presided over two Mozart evenings in Cahuenga Pass, the 50-year old musician proved neither an inspiration nor a drag to the Philharmonic players and their ability to make beautiful music in works they play regularly.

The “Nozze di Figaro” Overture displayed its usual thrust and buoyancy; the “Jupiter” Symphony, after a rather mechanical opening movement, sounded its charms most neatly. Any conductor who gets out of the way in the face of playing this clean deserves credit.

Something strange happened at the beginning of the concert:

Bishop-Kovacevich led the Overture without first conducting the National Anthem--a procedure usual, and, for some of us, expected, when the Philharmonic is reduced in size. Then, having missed their “Star-Spangled Banner,” a handful of patrons in the lower tier of boxes began singing the national anthem, sotto voce .

Soon, the song spread, and more and more members of the audience joined in. By the time of “the rockets’ red glare,” the orchestra had entered, and most people in the audience of 12,315 were singing.

Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for the Philharmonic Assn. told The Times that on Thursday night, Bishop-Kovacevich and the ensemble will precede his second Mozart program with the national anthem.