MUSIC REVIEW : Canadian Brass’ Bowl Extravaganza

The Canadian Brass was on a mission to entertain Wednesday night, sashaying onto the Hollywood Bowl stage to the tune of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” done a la Dixieland. The quintet, tellingly attired in white dress jackets and coordinated tennis shoes, offered up polished musicality with impish levity to match.

Kitsch may be a strong part of this group’s vocabulary, but there’s more--an assiduous musicality that enhances the cause of brass. This was a night of high, low and middling ambitions, unflappable resourcefulness and brassy grandeur as the 25-year-old group joined forces with the impressive brass-and-percussion ensemble Star of Indiana, conducted by Kenneth Schermerhorn.

From those ranks, the accomplished percussion ensemble summoned up heroic panache and quirky rethinking for an arrangement of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. All hands on stage conjured up a brassy sheen for snippets of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a work easily adapted without damage. For Gabrieli’s “Canzona per Sonare, No. 3,” the troops were dispersed around the Bowl’s box area, generating encircling, canonic ripples.

Not all the instrumental translations were so inspired. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 begged for the majesty of its original arrangement for organ. Samuel Barber’s elegiac Adagio for Strings lacked that all-important ethereal transparency.

On themes from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” the quintet brought out a vibrant warmth, but it only managed a well-meaning, stiffly phrased interpretation of a Duke Ellington medley.

To close, a resplendent Sousa medley, replete with beautifully gaudy choreography for object-twirling majorettes, seized the Bowl’s friendly audience--with a 8,434 head count--and rendered the evening’s aesthetic pluses and minuses somewhat moot. This, after all, was an evening in the park, a musical picnic where brass was king for a night.