Music Review : Moravec Shows Virtuosity at the Bowl

Though he has performed in Los Angeles on at least three occasions in the past 16 years, Ivan Moravec only got around to his L.A. Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl debuts this week. Wednesday night, the 63-year-old Czech pianist played Beethoven’s G-major Concerto with the Philharmonic on a Bowl preseason program conducted by Gerard Schwarz and attended by 5,788 concert-goers. Moravec, who is not unknown--he made his U.S. debut 30 years ago in Cleveland and his recordings have had wide distribution here--was worth waiting for.

His authority and virtuosity, as displayed in a polished and probing reading of the Fourth Piano Concerto, place him among other important international pianists born before 1940. He has style, technique, refinement and individuality; whatever the musical subject of his next local appearance, attention should be paid to it.

The special joy of this performance, on a Beethoven program where the concerto was surrounded by the symphonies Nos. 8 and 4, became the single-minded, hand-in-glove collaboration of conductor Schwarz and a second contingent--the first one played Mozart on Tuesday--of another 41 Philharmonic players. Schwarz and those colleagues made it all sound and look easy; we know it isn’t.

Around this elegance, the bumptious Beethoven proved hard to resist. At the end of the evening, and under Schwarz’s detailed guidance, the often ladylike Fourth Symphony showed lively tomboy spirits.

At the beginning, the Eighth Symphony revealed its peasant roots with a touching lack of pretension; only then, starting with the understatements of the second movement, did the work’s quiet nobility assert itself. Not surprisingly, in these inner movements, woodwind and horn soloists outdid themselves.