MUSIC REVIEW : Music of the Spheres at Bowl

In the process of becoming the composer of choice for Hollywood’s most grandiose event-movies, John Williams has also created more musical depictions of outer space than anyone in history.

On Friday, a Hollywood Bowl audience of 11,875 heard Williams conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program neatly summarizing his music of the spheres (on Saturday, the crowd was counted at 15,120). From the alien dissonances in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) through the whimsical Neverland flight from “Hook” (1991), Williams offered one orchestral starscape after another--plus, of course, evocations of sharks, dinosaurs and a hero with a whip.

Obviously, Williams knows how he wants this music to sound, and he drew clean, forceful playing from the Philharmonic--especially from the brass section in all those 18th-Century fanfares that Williams frequently juxtaposes to 19th-Century strings.

Unfortunately, the collection of show tunes by Gershwin, Rodgers and others that he conducted after intermission suffered from the same rigid symmetries and heavy lyricism evident in his foursquare interpretations of his film music.

Hearing “Mr. Goldstone” from the jaunty Styne overture to “Gypsy” played exactly like one of Williams’ ponderous space marches wasn’t the worst of it. No, that distinction belonged to “My Resistance Is Low” (from a six-part Hoagy Carmichael suite) and Rodgers’ “Lover,” both of which fell apart because Williams couldn’t seem to cope with all the contrasts (tempo, dynamics, etc.) built into the arrangements.

Concertmaster Alexander Treger dominated Ungar’s nostalgic “Ashokan Farewell” sequence from the PBS documentary “The Civil War,” the program’s most successful attempt at intimacy. However, both the scheduled program and the encores ended with American marches shorn of their lilt in favor of elephantine weight. Call it neo-Jurassic overkill.