MUSIC REVIEW : A Liberating Night at the Hollywood Bowl

Back at the beginning of the summer, Tuesday’s date on the Hollywood Bowl calendar read only “The Sights and Sounds of Sellars,” with program to be announced. In the event, actual sights beyond Bowl norms proved limited to Peter Sellars himself, characteristically costumed in a garish print caftan-and-pants suit.

If the visual elements were distinctly less spectacular than many anticipated, the sounds were colorful enough, though much less complementary than Sellars fondly set forth in puffy introductions. Basically a two-composer survey of “Music for a New World,” the program divided between the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra also seemed to split the potential audience, luring only 7,237 to the amphitheater.

The hinge connecting the first two symphonies of Carlos Chavez with the Haden-Carla Bley “Dream Keeper” music was apparently orchestral treatment of ethnically based, revolutionary music. But Chavez’s music is much less authentically folkloristic than Sellars and Co. imagine, and the efforts of Haden’s ensemble on this occasion were far from orchestral.

Which is not to say the playing was weak. Strong, traditionally rooted jazz solos abounded, particularly from trumpeter Tom Harrell and sax men Makanda Ken McIntyre, Joe Lovano and Dewey Redman.

But the concerted work often sounded frayed. Some of it may have been due to the uneven amplification, but the most troubled moments also coincided with the most heavily aspiring, cross-culturally reaching material, politically correct but often musically suspect.

The “Dream Keeper” installments were most diffuse and uncertain. Bley’s writing there sounded square and awkward, and created its own ensemble problems. The contributions of the L.A. Victory Youth Choir, under the direction of Steven A. Taylor, emerged from the haze with only intermittently understandable portions of the Langston Hughes text.

Everything peaked wonderfully in the finale, however, Haden’s “Spiritual.” Amina Claudine Myers launched it with fluid gospel grace in her singing, and pertinent, controlled power in her pianism, which later rose to a driving, inventive polymetric solo. The choir’s punctuations hit cleanly, and Ray Anderson stole the show with his truly climactic trombone solos, which pushed the instrument into exalted spasms.

After this long, and yes, ultimately liberating set, Lawrence Foster and the Philharmonic had the unenviable task of matching that level of raw energy. They began the attempt with Chavez’s “Sinfonia de Antigona,” one of the most heroically crabby and repressed pieces in the repertory.

Some listeners fled, but the effort was quite respectable on its own austere terms. Even more impressive was the flamboyant follow-up in the “Sinfonia india.” Foster kept the very Coplandesque creation, composed in New York for a CBS radio broadcast, in sharply detailed motion, and the Philharmonic proved there was more than one band on stage that night with accomplished soloists.