Music Review : Cautious Mozart, Bourgeois Brahms at Bowl

After his impressive conducting of Slavic music Tuesday at the Hollywood Bowl, Libor Pesek, again at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, turned to Mozart and Brahms Thursday night. This time the results were far less impressive.

Any judgments must, admittedly, be tempered because the amplification system seemed to shave off whole bands from the harmonic spectrum, dissipating power and focus.

Still, the interpretations that emerged were generally straight-forward, cautious, unimaginative and uninvolving. This may not be Pesek’s best repertory.

Alicia de Larrocha was the fluent soloist in Mozart’s ultimate piano concerto, K. 595. Both she and the conductor kept the pacing slow, the emotional range limited and contrasting material homogenized. Neither was apparently distracted when a helicopter swooped loudly overhead during the composer’s cadenza in the first movement.

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Nothing went terribly wrong but there were lots of missed opportunities, although the audience of 8,309 didn’t seem to mind too much. They warmly applauded De Larrocha.

Pesek made Brahms’ First Symphony sound like the work of a mature and respectable citizen rather than that of a Titan-heir to Beethoven. “Nothing in excess” appeared to be the conductor’s motto.

He provided minimal tension and urgency, few lightning strikes and little full-throated expressivity.

His best ideas occurred in the second movement where he established light and frail string textures, out of which emerged David Weiss’ tender oboe solos and, at the close, concertmaster Alexander Treger’s warm, prominent passages.

But too often the conductor pulled the composer’s punches.

Pesek opened the program with a solid account of the overture to Mozart’s “Die Enfuhrung aus dem Serail.”