Trek to ‘Camelot’ Gives Bowl’s Season Hollywood Ending

She’s Carmen on a new recording of Bizet’s opera and will be Rosina in an upcoming L.A. Opera production of “The Barber of Seville” this winter. He’s Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, which is all “Star Trek” fans need to know.

But this time it was she as Guinevere and he as Arthur who helped the Hollywood Bowl complete its 75th anniversary season over the weekend. And the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was clearly hoping to mine crossover gold by presenting the dazzling young mezzo-soprano from Atlanta, Jennifer Larmore, and the noted British Shakespearean and Trekkie fave, Patrick Stewart, in extended excerpts from “Camelot.”

No one bats an eyelash anymore at the peculiar combinations of opera and Hollywood for reviving the scores of classic Broadway musicals. Still, the orchestra’s principal conductor, John Mauceri, does have his own agenda, which is to take the Hollywood in the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra extremely seriously. So Stewart and Larmore were hardly expected to compete with Broadway’s Richard Burton and Julie Andrews but rather with Richard Harris and a young Vanessa Redgrave in the 1967 film of the Lerner and Loewe musical.

Mauceri, in other words, went for the full glitz and used the lavish Hollywood orchestral arrangements meant to suit the big screen in place of the more modest original orchestrations intended for a Broadway pit. There are two dangers in that approach. One is that the orchestrations can, particularly in a live situation (even with amplification), overwhelm the voices and personalities. The other is that they add an additional measure of corn to a score that, while it has its inspirations, already has enough.

Thus, Larmore, Stewart and the opera baritone Rodney Gilfry (Lancelot), had their work cut out for them. Stewart--funny and sentimental in the right unmawkish proportions--can sing (far better, surely, than Burton or Harris). And he seemed as comfortable in Arthur’s court as in a starship. But Larmore, with her deep, luscious voice, and Gilfry (who gets the show’s biggest hit, “If Ever I Would Leave You”) couldn’t get the opera out of their lungs, and the fat, Straussian orchestrations seemed to egg them on in all the wrong directions.

The 40 minutes of music from “Camelot” took up about half the the annual fireworks finale, this year titled “A Trip to Great Britain,” and the tourist guides were straight off the studio lot. Squeezed between Elgar’s graduation classic, “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on “Greensleeves,” was the concert premiere of the suite Franz Waxman made of his music to the 1954 film “Prince Valiant”--robust, lush and interestingly orchestrated film music that holds up slightly better than the creaky comic-book Arthurian wide-screen epic. It also presented a small challenge for an under-rehearsed orchestra.

More telling, though, was the inclusion of Walton’s “Orb and Scepter,” the popular march he wrote for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Walton wrote film music, especially that for Olivier’s Shakespeare, that has lasted in concert, and he also happened to conduct his coronation march at the Bowl two months after he had written it. When is the last time you can remember a distinguished and popular composer conducting his music at the Hollywood Bowl?

Colorizing, that is the projection of shifting colored lights on the shell, has become the way of pop concerts at the Bowl. But a lesson might be learned from the old Hollywood it so loves to evoke. The surprising shift from black-and-white to color can be arresting--remember “The Wizard of Oz.” The nifty pyrotechnics that traditionally accompany Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” to close the season always had more impact in the days when the concerts, themselves, were in black and white.