Music Review : Bowl ‘Preview’ Offers Inspired Mozart

Setting a standard that will be hard for others to maintain over the coming, 10-week summer season, Gerard Schwarz opened “preview week” at the Hollywood Bowl Tuesday with a Mozart program played inspiredly by 41 members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Mozart, of course, has been a longtime specialty of the symphonically versatile American conductor. But years of probing have not made Schwarz insensitive to the endless charms of this repertory. He conducts it not only with deep knowledge and broad perspective but with true lightness and perfect balance. And unending affection.

After a surprisingly transparent “Star-Spangled Banner,” the 46-year-old conductor led the Philharmonic contingent in a serious but never heavy-handed revival of the Symphony No. 35 (“Haffner”) in which the band delivered all the boldness and delicacy in this score with a superior effortlessness and a lean sense of style.

Playing this polished is not the stock-in-trade at Bowl performances--but then, conductors this authoritative are not usual, either.

At the other end of the program, heard by a clap-happy audience of 8,658 Bowlgoers, Schwarz and his colleagues delineated a compelling and beauteous run-through of the “Linz” Symphony, wherein we were again reminded that true leadership--the kind one finds seldom on any podium, anywhere--combines aggression with permissiveness: Inspire them to play, then leave them alone to do it.

Between the symphonies, Israeli-American violinist Gil Shaham was the highly musical, efficient and slender-toned soloist in the Concerto in G, K. 216. Here, Schwarz and the chamber-sized orchestra became amiable colleagues.