MUSIC REVIEW : Mozart Concert Restores the Calm at Hollywood Bowl

Van Cliburn is back on the road, blithely playing an abbreviated version of the massive comeback program he aborted at Hollywood Bowl last week.

Itzhak Perlman is concentrating on the fiddle again, having completed his stints as hypergushing TV host and pops-concert soloist.

The three tenorissimos are home counting their bucks and preparing the coffers for an orgy of instantly glorious reruns.

Music lovers who managed to buy tickets for recent Los Angeles galas are beginning to think about paying off their new mortgages.

The chartreuse rain forest in the pavilions has been dismantled, waterfalls and all, and Dodger Stadium is beginning to look like a ballpark again.

The quasi-artistic byproducts of soccermania are receding into a haze of nostalgia. For some, the recession comes not a second too soon.

Tuesday night, it was business as usual, once again, at Hollywood Bowl. Relief. Mozart be praised.

It was lovely business, quiet business, sensible business, sensitive business. It was unpretentious business, even elegant business.

Make that business better than usual.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, appropriately reduced, played host to an unfamiliar conductor and a pianist barely remembered from the distant past. Although both would be welcome guests in any context, they seemed especially welcome after all those toots and whistles.

The visiting maestro was Matthias Bamert, director of the London Mozart Players as well as the Lucerne Festival in his native Switzerland. He isn’t exactly a podium superstar. More important, however, he is a musician equipped with a solid technique and a stylistic conscience.

The soloist was Maria Tipo. Never mind that the program heralded her as Mario.

When she last (and first) appeared with our orchestra, playing the Beethoven First Concerto, the perceptive Times critic found her “a pianist of exceptional qualities.” He went on to laud her “clean and facile fingers,” her “sharply defined sense of rhythm, and effective . . . command of color contrasts.”

That was in 1956. The critic was Albert Goldberg. Our orchestra was still playing in Philharmonic Auditorium downtown. The conductor was Eduard van Beinum. Tipo was 24 at the time.

She remains a pianist of exceptional qualities. As her career progressed, she has concentrated on teaching in addition to playing. Hers never became a household name, but, with the passage of time and the thinning of ranks, Tipo did became something of a connoisseur’s pianist.

Her performance of the Concerto No. 21 in C, K. 467, was an object lesson in the fusion of pathos and grace, and a triumph of informed understatement. Here, at last, was an artist who respected the ebb and flow of Mozart’s rhetoric. Here was an artist who could project lyricism without fussiness, intimacy without preciousness, speed without haste.

Her phrasing was always supple, her shading always subtle--even in the wide, open spaces. She introduced her own spiffy cadenzas--organic yet concise--and she made an ethereal nocturne of the “Elvira Madigan” andante without resorting to romantic excess.

The Italian pianist found a sympathetic ally in Bamert, a conductor who knows exactly when to follow and when to lead, and who does both without calling undue attention to himself. For once, the word collaboration seemed to mean something.

Bamert opened the rather lengthy program with the Cassation in G, K. 63, a half-hour set of minuets, marches and other manifestations of Salzburg street-music cranked out by Mozart when he was a lad of 13. The lightweight formula pieces may threaten to wear out their welcome before the final cadence, but they certainly deserve to be heard once in a while. On this occasion, 225 years after their creation, they were being heard for the first time by a Los Angeles Philharmonic audience.

After intermission, Bamert and his responsive players brought wry and easy charm to the F-major Divertimento, K. 138 (written when Mozart was a mature 16). Turning to the great Symphony No. 39, K. 543 (written when Mozart was an old man of 32), they reinforced the essential urgency without compromising either clarity or wit.

It should always be like this.

Official attendance figures: 10,733 patrons, six airplanes.