MUSIC REVIEW : Blomstedt and S.F. Symphony Bring the Blahs to the Bowl

The summer season at Hollywood Bowl is beginning to wind down. But while our own Philharmonic tours to conquer Europe, the parade of visiting orchestras grinds on at Cahuenga Pass.

This week we are playing host to Herbert Blomstedt--a solidly professional old-school maestro--and his San Francisco Symphony--a perfectly competent orchestra that can be considerably more than that under the right conditions on the right night.

Tuesday night apparently was not the right night.

Nothing went seriously wrong in a conservative program (the first of three consecutive conservative programs) devoted to Rachmaninoff’s semi-somnolent quasi-valedictory Symphonic Dances and Beethoven’s hardy Seventh Symphony. Unfortunately, nothing turned out to be genuinely memorable.

It was just another opening, another show. . . .

The agenda began with rather odd attention to the obligatory “Star-Spangled Banner.” Ever courteous, Blomstedt waved his stick directly at the sing-along throng, turning his back on the orchestra. No problem. The players obviously know how their boss looks.

Any innocent patriot out front who tried to follow Blomstedt sign-language, however, was in trouble. Even allowing for the automatic confusion enforced by sonic time delay in the wide open spaces, the beat seemed erratic, the melodic impetus jerky.

Under the circumstances, one approached the real music on the agenda with a little trepidation. Not to worry. Early in the concert, it became clear that the San Franciscans understand what Blomstedt wants. After nine years under his no-nonsense leadership, they have had a lot of practice reading his complex signals.

Rachmaninoff’s melancholic, sometimes bloated, occasionally poignant Symphonic Dances of 1940 didn’t exactly soar on this occasion. Still, the pacing was always logical. The stresses all came in the right places.

Despite the abiding murk of the “improved” amplification system (it hasn’t been a good summer for the microphone engineers), the orchestra sounded bright and tight. That is more than could be said for the itinerant ensemble from Detroit last Thursday.

After intermission, Blomstedt managed to turn Beethoven’s indomitable Seventh into something like an extended academic exercise. There were no exaggerations here, and no distortions. Nor was there much inspiration or excitement.

The maestro, ever cool, took no chances. The internal repetitions emerged dutiful rather than climactic. The secondary voices tended to get buried in textural mush. The tempos were brisk yet rigid. The ultimate cadence brought relief rather than resolution.

We probably can thank Beethoven more than Blomstedt for the inevitable ovation.

*

Incidental intelligence:

* Blomstedt had the good sense to resist any temptation to add an encore. Beethoven is a tough act to follow.

* The 1994-95 season will be Blomstedt’s last as music director in San Francisco. The mood and the mode will no doubt change drastically when Michael Tilson Thomas takes over.

* Although a stellar soloist might have made the occasion more festive, and the bill more attractive, the concert reportedly attracted an audience of 9,215. The crowd didn’t look that big to the untrained eye.

* It was a buzzingly busy night in the sky, with eight aeronautical intrusions--most of them obliterating Beethoven’s pianissimo passages, of course. One wonders what happened to the official system that used to route planes away from the Bowl on concert nights.