MUSIC REVIEWS : An Uneventful ‘Fireworks Finale’

Except that the fireworks began an hour early--then quickly stopped, for later delivery--and then backed up, smokily, into the amphitheater when their real time came around, the season-closing “Fireworks Finale” at Hollywood Bowl Friday night proved uneventful.

Only its conclusion became genuinely disappointing. Whether due to a lowering inversion layer or just to a lack of normal winds, the residual smoke from the fireworks show at the end of the program--accompanying Handel’s “Fireworks Music”--did not disperse into the night sky above Cahuenga Pass, but instead remained low to the ground, near hillside level.

The rest of the evening seldom gave thrills, but went along without incident. David Alan Miller conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic vigorously in a passel of Dvorak pieces--the “Carnival” Overture and three Slavonic Dances--at the beginning, and the prescribed wind-band (of Philharmonic players, plus friends) gamely in Roy Tanabe’s edition of the “Fireworks Music” at the end.

Before intermission, Philharmonic principal Ronald Leonard was the impassioned, expert soloist in Saint-Saens’ First Cello Concerto, accompanied sympathetically by Miller and the orchestra.

Then, after the break, Evelyn Glennie, a percussionist from Scotland, performed, with the Philharmonic, familiar pieces by Saint-Saens, Rodgers, Monti and Rimsky--her first encore, “Flight of the Bumblebee,” on the marimba and related pitched percussion.

Unaccompanied, she offered another encore, her own “A Little Prayer,” which sounds like a chordal version of Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” without the melody. Despite recurring inaccuracies in passagework and idiosyncrasies of phrasing, Glennie seems a highly individual, perhaps even valuable, soloist. An informational box in the printed program identified her as one of several “AT&T; Premiere Artists” appearing with the Philharmonic this month.

Official attendance: Friday, 17,942; Saturday, 17,931.