MUSIC REVIEW : Miller Balances Unusual Bits With More Familiar Fare

Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony seems like ideal Hollywood Bowl repertory, appropriate musical fare for an outdoor setting: An extroverted, tuneful and event-filled work in primary symphonic colors, easy of access and emotionally apprehendable.

William Grant Still’s “Kaintuck,” for piano and orchestra, on the other hand, possesses qualities better savored inside an auditorium: Its melodies are charming, not contagious, its outlines muted, its genuine virtues subtle and understated.

Both works, the virtually century-old, ultra-familiar “New World” and the 56-year-old rarity came together on David Alan Miller’s latest Los Angeles Philharmonic program of the 1991 summer season Thursday night at Hollywood Bowl. As might have been predicted, the former shone, the latter mystified.

“Kaintuck,” make no mistake, is a worthy and brief (11 minutes) piece of music, not exactly characteristic of the late composer’s well-curried Afro-American musical style. It exists, rather, in that tradition of single-movement concerted works sometimes produced by French writers (Franck, Faure Francaix).

But it remains--as Still’s subtitle, “poem for piano and orchestra,” indicates--a work of unabashed and quiet lyricism, as well as self-effacing jazziness, and not easy to project on an outdoor stage facing an amphitheater the size of Hollywood Bowl.

Thursday it was most handsomely played by pianist Richard Fields, a young American prize-winner of achievement and resource. Fields gave it an affectionate and apparently accurate execution, though he failed to make it compelling for the listener. Miller and the Philharmonic seemed timid in their advocacy of the work.

Fields showed a greater range of his pianistic abilities in an orthodox, if not always bold, run-through of Liszt’s E-flat Concerto, to which he seems less temperamentally suited than he might be to the composer’s A-major work. Debut nerves may have caused momentary lapses of confidence in the finale. The orchestra remained unfazed.

Miller’s way with the “New World” Symphony proved motivated but not overpushy, a clear view of the familiar landscape in a well-paced series of ascending climaxes. The splendid English horn soloist in the Largo was Carolyn Hove.

By way of overture, Miller led the Philharmonic, after a surprisingly lugubrious national anthem, in a bright and welcome revival of Three Dance Episodes from Leonard Bernstein’s score to “On the Town.”

Attendance: 10,296.