Music Review : ‘Sinfonia Antartica’ Returns to Open UK / LA Festival

The last time Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Sinfonia Antartica” was heard at Hollywood Bowl, in 1976, a small, end-of-summer crowd of 5,041 was in attendance. When the work returned to Cahuenga Pass Wednesday night on the first official event in the 1994 UK/LA Festival, another underpopulated audience greeted it. On hand were merely 6,301 listeners.

Those listeners, however, showed themselves to be hardy souls, and not put off by the work’s long-windedness. They stayed through to the end, and then applauded lustily. And, though Vaughan Williams’ Seventh Symphony has been called the least successful of his mature works in the form, it does have its solid charms; hearing it is not necessarily painful.

As played enthusiastically and with strong affection by the visiting Halle Orchestra of Manchester, England, under principal conductor Kent Nagano, the pleasant, humorless Seventh actually glowed in this outdoor setting.

The performance moved along, achieved its well-placed climaxes and exerted considerable attractiveness. Clearly, the American conductor knows the idiom; for their part, the accomplished Halle instrumentalists apparently relish delivering the composer’s long, leisurely lines. Assisting here were more Americans: soprano soloist Linda Williams Pearce and the women of John Alexander’s Pacific Chorale.

After the obligatory double national anthems--played at fluctuating tempos, one noted--the British musical agenda began with more Elgar--one piece by this composer showed up on three of the four Bowl programs this week. This was the Introduction and Allegro of 1905, and it showed off the Halle’s mellow strings handsomely.

Substituting on short notice for the announced Jeremy Irons (who was called away by illness in his family), another British actor, Julian Sands, read the movement headings to the “Sinfonia Antartica” and narrated the five-part suite from William Walton’s score to the 1944 film of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.”

Despite a generally monochromatic delivery, Sands articulated these texts conscientiously. Under Nagano, the orchestra performed Walton’s energetic and eloquent music with lean strength and an easy command.