MUSIC REVIEW : More Classical Pops in the Cahuenga Pass

Genius and talent, Semites and anti-Semites, early success and mid-career crises: The dichotomies of music history, endlessly fascinating, pepper the concert comments of conductor John Mauceri charmingly. The 46-year-old American musician seems to tell good and unhackneyed stories before every one of his performances.

Mauceri, founding director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, was in fine form Thursday night, as he led his talented band of players through another classical pops concert in the Bowl. Too bad the ensemble’s playing proved so inconsistent.

Its program at least made sense, as raconteur Mauceri explored extramusical connections between works by Mendelssohn, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Erich Korngold. Conductor Mauceri showed an expertise we may now perhaps begin to take for granted. But the orchestra’s playing--which vacillated between smooth and accident-prone, between brilliant and raucous, and between solid and unreliable in ensemble, intonation and balance--fell below that standard we have come to expect in this locale.

The better playing came in Mendelssohn’s G-minor Piano Concerto and in Korngold’s own suite from his film “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938).

In the first, Mauceri & Co. accompanied pianist Stephen Hough most sensitively, and with great enthusiasm. Hough’s firebrand/poetic performance, admirably exuberant and stylistically convincing, seemed to obliterate memories of other pianists in this work.

In “Robin Hood,” being heard in the Bowl for the first time, Korngold’s focused dramatic accomplishments and wonderful ear for color were brought to the fore, in a kaleidoscopic, rousing reading. The piece itself, in a post-Elgarian style now familiar as a relic of the 1930s, seems practically irresistible.