MUSIC REVIEW : Kent Nagano Brings His Britons to Hollywood Bowl

The ads heralded “A British Celebration” at Hollywood Bowl. And that, after a fashion, is what the 7,979 customers got Tuesday night.

Sitting in for the L.A. Philharmonic was the Halle Orchestra, a decidedly distinguished ensemble from Manchester. The evening began with our national anthem, followed by “God Save the Queen,” which many in the sing-along crowd mistook for “My Country, ‘tis of Thee.”

The podium was manned by Kent Nagano, who happens to be an American (born in Morro Bay) but has served the Halle as music director since 1992. The piano soloist was Barry Douglas, rightful pride of Belfast. After some universal-language Beethoven, the two-component program turned to the massive churnings of Edward Elgar’s First Symphony, which had received its world premiere at the hands of the selfsame orchestra 86 years ago.

So this had to be the inauguration of the vaunted UK/LA Festival, right?

Wrong. That followed on Wednesday, same time, same place, same essential participants.

So what makes one concert a mere celebration and the next an officially festive event?

Hype. That’s what. Arbitrary hype.

Luckily, the quality of music-making counts more than the vagary of labeling. The quality was pretty high on this occasion.

Nagano, lithe and dynamic if not particularly flamboyant, is a solid technician. The Halle Orchestra is a well-balanced instrument capable of both power without stridency and finesse without fussiness. Conductor and players seem to enjoy a mutually beneficial rapport.

Ironically, they encountered some problems in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which is undeniably great music, yet played quite brilliantly in the Elgar, which isn’t.

The problems in the concerto had nothing to do with Douglas, who, once again, revealed the mind of an analyst, the sensitivity of a poet and the fingers of a magician. He stormed the outer allegros with granitic strength yet found exquisite repose in the reflections of the limpid adagio and stooped to willful exaggeration at neither extreme. His was a marvelously lucid, eminently heroic, mildly--not wildly--impulsive performance.

Nagano provided generally sympathetic but sometimes sluggish orchestral support. Perhaps the players were disconcerted by electro-acoustic distortions that threatened for a while to turn the piano into an over-amplified bass-heavy thump machine. Perhaps they were distracted by a particularly rude aeronautical ostinato that all but obliterated the pianissimo tones of the slow movement.

The problems, in any case, were neatly resolved after intermission on behalf of Elgar’s dreary, sprawling, swollen, portentous, pretentious, mushy, turgid, stuffy, convoluted, meandering, endless, justifiably seldom-heard symphony.

The great Hans Richter, who led the world premiere in 1908, called this 57-minute endurance test “the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer, not just in this country.”

Boggle.

Could he have been unfamiliar with the symphonies of Mahler or the tone poems of Strauss? Could his judgment have been clouded by the lovely moments of introspection buried at the end of the adagio? Could he have been currying favor?

One didn’t have to admire the vehicle, of course, to appreciate the way it was driven on this occasion. One had to be grateful for a performance obviously predicated on interpretive conviction and stylistic authority.

Nagano and the orchestra did what they could. It was a lot.

Non-vital statistics: three airplanes, four helicopters, one siren, no encores and an amazingly sophisticated if smallish audience that actually refrained from applauding between movements--even after the climax of Beethoven’s opening allegro.