Weekend Reviews : Dance : Mauceri, Bowl Orchestra Interpret Classic Film Scores

Looking something like a futuristic drive-in theater, Hollywood Bowl sported a 56-by-21-foot movie screen across the top of the shell on Friday and Saturday for a program of film scores performed by John Mauceri and the Bowl Orchestra.

Call it a high-concept concert: Mauceri conducting music from Hollywood classics in sync (more or less) with projected clips. Add a few orchestral miniatures by the same slate of film composers and you have an event appealing enough to attract 12,593 patrons on Friday and 16,637 on Saturday.

Except for Bernard Herrmann’s brooding, mysterious and ultimately anguished accompaniments for “Citizen Kane,” the program arguably highlighted musical dexterity more than inspiration. Certainly, the intrepid Warner stunt men were more responsible for the delirious excitement of the forest ambush in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” than the quasi-period platitudes of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Oscar-winning score.

Here and throughout the evening, the composer’s essential task involved building and sustaining tension--then, somehow, postponing its release until Robin shoots the final arrow or somebody falls off Mt. Rushmore (Herrmann’s music for “North by Northwest”) or Scarlett vows she’ll never be hungry again (Max Steiner’s music for “Gone With the Wind”).

*

In his remarks, Mauceri emphasized the distinction between “underscoring” (a.k.a. mood music or action enhancement) and “source music” (scenes with musicians performing on screen). As an example of the latter, he presented Miklos Rozsa’s music from the ball sequence in “Madame Bovary”: a suite of social dances culminating in an ecstatic waltz.

The orchestra offered its most sumptuous playing of the evening here and in a collage of episodes showcasing Rozsa’s contribution to “Ben-Hur.” The same composer’s “Spellbound Concerto” provided the program’s longest conventional concert experience: twelve minutes with a dark movie screen but plenty of neo-Romantic fireworks in the playing of pianist David Buechner.

Also filmless and neatly executed: Korngold’s bubbly “Die kleine Serenade” for Small Orchestra, Herrmann’s intimate “Memory Waltz” and the propulsive last section of Rozsa’s Theme, Variations and Finale.