Lively French Program From Estonian Conductor Klas

The French, so happily confident in the superiority of their culture and so precise in their language, have often been spectacularly successful in appropriating other cultures. No one, for instance, ever wrote a better “Spanish” violin concerto than Edouard Lalo did in his “Symphonie Espagnole.” No Romantic German tone poem is stormier than Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D-Minor.

And for a great many of its fans, along with aging Bo Derek admirers, Ravel’s “Bolero” is surely the last word in renditions of the Spanish dance.

That these three chestnuts (the best-known works by each of these Frenchmen) made for a popular program by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl Tuesday night is hardly unusual. That they happened to be entrusted to the sturdy hands of an Estonian conductor was, however, something out of the ordinary.

Eri Klas, who has conducted Beethoven at the Bowl before and who will return to conduct more Beethoven tonight, has many of the qualities one associates with conductors trained under the old Soviet system. There is a certain weight brought to every phrase.

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Indeed even the “Star-Spangled Banner,” opening the evening as always, was slow and throbbing with unembarrassed patriotic expression (and with none of the good-natured glitz American conductors regularly bring to it).

Klas was also rock-solid with the Franck symphony. (Franck, incidentally, was Belgian-born, but his career was in Paris.) That is not always an advantage. A really good performance of the 40-minute work, ever churning its diminished harmonies, ever riding scales up and down, ever building to unresolved climaxes, may induce seasickness in the squeamish. (A great performance of it, like the wild one conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler in the tumultuous Vienna of 1945 and recently issued on an Arlecchino CD, brings on vertigo.)

Klas, however, kept a steady ship on rough seas. He inspired assured playing from the Philharmonic and upset no picnic baskets. But the symphony, once so popular in Hollywood as soundtrack material for silent films (it’s the music stirring up emotions as the train speeds toward the young damsel tied to the tracks), now can seem a relic if performed without flamboyance.

The flamboyance came after intermission, when Klas proved less predictable and the Philharmonic concertmaster Martin Chalifour was the soloist in the Lalo concerto. It is a fun fact that Klas made his conducting debut at the Estonian National Opera in Tallinn conducting, of all things, “West Side Story.”

And seemingly out of the blue Tuesday, Klas showed off a little of that Bernsteinian sensibility, becoming suddenly debonair, dancing along to Lalo’s Spanish rhythms, looking, to the delight of the audience, for all the world like a classical music version of Yeltsin rocking and rolling.

He almost stole the show, but it turned out that no one could steal it from Chalifour. Most concertmasters get the occasional star turn in order to keep them happy, and most give competent but unremarkable performances. Chalifour plays more often, and for good reason. He is soloist material.

Playing with utter technical security, with a tone as clear and clean as a mountain stream, and with a wonderful nonchalance that suited Frenchified Spanish music just fine, he simply dazzled. The crowd loved him. Klas seemed to love him (and Chalifour seemed as amused as everyone else by the dancing Russian bear). And the only question was how is the Philharmonic ever going to hang on to him?

Bolero played itself. Klas kept to a careful beat, built the crescendo carefully and left the Philharmonic players enough room to bring out the jazziness in ways they probably know better than the conductor. Only the final climax seemed a bit perfunctory.

Perhaps next year Klas will be invited back to conduct the Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story”--that would be worth hearing.

* Eri Klas conducts again at the Hollywood Bowl tonight, with soloist Garrick Ohlsson, 8:30, 2301 N. Highland Ave. $1-$75. (213) 480-3232.