Music Review : Nagano Leads Workmanlike Bowl Concert

In its third concert in as many nights, England’s oldest orchestra, the visiting Halle Orchestra from Manchester, went about its duties in a thoroughly workmanlike fashion.

Its conductor, too, the Morro Bay-born Kent Nagano, never much of one for rapturous flights of fancy or emotional excess anyway, clocked in with a resolutely professional job.

The program Thursday at Hollywood Bowl (before a crowd of 7,961) had not been put together with any particular care for themes and resonances. It listed Richard Strauss’ “Don Juan,” Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto and Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations. It was a difficult night for an experienced listener to be satisfied.

In Strauss’ swashbuckling tone poem, one missed the clash of foils and gush of romance that the composer so effectively captured. This was a generally tidy reading, muscular, hefty at climaxes, but also sluggish and by-the-numbers.

In Stravinsky’s prickly Concerto, violinist Cho-Liang Lin was his usual cool, incisive, bracing self. He played with consistent point, powerful direction and steely virtuosity.

Unfortunately, Nagano ignored Stravinsky’s explicit demands to pare down the orchestra--around 60 strings were onstage to the composer’s dictated 30, and in drastically different proportions--so that the accompaniment just chugged along lackadaisically, and none too neatly.

With the “Enigma” Variations we seemed on terra firma; at least there was something approaching a true interpretation going on here. Nagano explored detail and nuance in his reading, flirting with inaudibility on occasion and, in his ethereal, unhurried lyricism, sometimes letting the pace sag.

The Halle, solid in all of its choirs though distinguished in none, responded alertly and amply. During the encore, Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on “Greensleeves,” a car alarm went off and ruined it. How does one steal a car from stack parking, anyway?