MUSIC REVIEW : Conductor Cambreling Exits the Bowl Gracefully

At Hollywood Bowl, pianists come and pianists go--and the repertory stays the same. Rachmaninoff and Beethoven concertos are the amphitheater’s stock in trade, and the summer market stays open.

This season, with notable exceptions, the crop of keyboardists looks to be often populated by musicians younger than 35. Thursday, for example, before an audience of 9,726, there was a debut performance by a pianist from Sweden born in 1971, one Peter Jablonski, who played Rachmaninoff’s “Paganini” Rhapsody with a startling insouciance bordering on the indifferent.

Make no mistake: This was a technically adept, musically thorough performance, if one also limited in dimension. Young Jablonski is competent and accomplished; he depresses those keys with great speed and efficiency, never beats the orchestra to the bar line, and even articulates with a semblance--if little projection--of feeling.

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But. He does not probe or color the composer’s phrases with intensity, passion or insights, or deliver an arching line from section to section, or even within a single variation. He merely gets the job done, in a very cool manner.

Jablonski was assisted, in the Rhapsody, and in the ensuing performance of Lutoslawski’s accessible and jolly Variations on the same Paganini theme, most handsomely, and with some of the finesse and nuance missing in the piano-playing, by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and guest conductor Sylvain Cambreling.

Closing his two-concert visit to the Bowl, Cambreling began the evening with an almost-solemn run-through of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed that with a no-nonsense but transparent reading of Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture, and closed the proceedings with a very touching performance of Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony.

Despite a few extramusical distractions--one particularly loud passing helicopter during the Adagio (of course), for instance--this was a “Scottish” that showed our resident orchestra at its best in terms of dynamic expansiveness, refined soft-playing, well-considered and virtuosic solo lines and an overall sound balancing lushness and clarity.

The achievement is clearly the players’, but the catalyst was the French musician on the podium.