A Classical Prelude at the Bowl : Christopher Hogwood conducts a preseason program of Haydn and Mozart with more style than virtuosity.

For most practical purposes, the relatively serious business of music-making at Hollywood Bowl will begin on Tuesday when David Zinman leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in some communal flexing of Tchaikovsky’s pathetically heroic muscles.

For impractical purposes, however, the symphonic summer began on Thursday when Christopher Hogwood led a suitably reduced version of our orchestra through a preseason program devoted to the classical intimacies of Haydn and Mozart.

The non-subscription audience, officially tabulated at 6,094, hardly filled a third of the wide-open spaces of Cahuenga Pass. Still, the communal spirit was cheery. So, after a fashion, were the performances.

Hogwood is hardly the world’s most subtle technician. The scholarly British maestro does not demand a great deal of accuracy from his players, and he does not enforce a lot of finesse.

Nevertheless, he has persuasive ideas in matters of style, and he keeps things moving with brisk dispatch and ingratiating gusto. His left hand knows what his right hand is doing.

If only he wouldn’t talk so much. . . .

Following an authentic 18th-Century custom, he used Haydn’s festive, remarkably progressive “Military” Symphony, No. 100, as a program bookend, opening the concert with the first two movements and closing with the last two. In between, he scheduled Mozart’s Wind Serenade No. 12 in C-minor, the overture to Mozart’s “Entfuhrung aus dem Serail” and Haydn’s C-major Cello Concerto.

The lovely, faintly melancholic Serenade sounded rather fragile in the huge amphitheater, decent amplification notwithstanding, and it was rather roughly executed by a select Philharmonic octet. The Singspiel overture sounded elegantly if quaintly exotic, as it should.

The concerto served as a challenging vehicle for Ronald Leonard, stalwart principal cellist of the Philharmonic since 1975. He played with poised, slender tone and plenty of propulsive brio, even when encountering pitch problems during moments of agitated stress.

Incidental intelligence: Those who happened to wonder how Michael Woo was celebrating Richard Riordan’s mayoral inauguration needed to look no farther than box 630. One hopes the charms of music proved soothing to a savaged political breast.