Familiarity Breeds Respect

The opening of the 1997 season of the Hollywood Bowl Tuesday night was not lacking in ambition. The L.A. Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen was on hand, as was Maxim Vengerov, an astonishingly consummate violinist at age 22. Vengerov played the Brahms Violin Concerto, a work that is, if nothing else, music of vaunting grandness. These are two musicians who bespeak boldly and proudly the future. Yet first they had to overcome the past.

A bittersweet mood threatened. Dorothy Chandler, who had famously saved the Hollywood Bowl in 1951, was remembered two days after her death at age 96 by Ernest Fleischmann in his opening remarks. And the retiring Fleischmann, who had been hired by Chandler in 1969 to manage the Philharmonic and who made the Bowl the important venue it is today, is overseeing his last summer season.

The concert itself harkened to old Bowl formulas of presenting the most comfortable music possible. Indeed, nothing had to be changed on the program to honor Chandler. Bruno Walter conducted Beethoven’s “Egmont”Overture 46 years ago when the Bowl reopened after Chandler raised the money to bail it out. And that is the piece that Salonen had originally programmed to open Tuesday’s concert. The excerpts from Prokofiev’s popular ballet “Romeo and Juliet,” which concluded it, would not have raised eyebrows 46 years ago, either.

Yet I doubt that there is a less sentimental conductor of high accomplishment on the planet than Salonen. Nostalgia is not an emotion he practices, at least when he is on the podium. Who can even imagine what a lyrical Old Worlder like Walter would have thought of Salonen’s efficient, cleanly etched “Egmont”?

What Salonen brings to Beethoven and Brahms is the temperament of a restorer, an intellectual window-washer. He squirts aural Windex on the scores, so that one can more easily peer in. One example is the way underlying syncopated rhythms when not perfectly attended to can make Brahms sound like mush; Salonen shows them up clearly. But in making the moment fascinating, he also exhibits the complementary tendency to make the bigger picture a bit dull.

Vengerov is just the opposite. A technical wizard and an irresistible enthusiast, he is the personification of the musician as all-striving romantic. He pushes his gorgeous big tone hard, thrusting impulsively here, holding back deliciously for lyric moments.

There is a danger is this kind of collaboration of different temperaments, not the obvious one of conflict but a more likely one of collegial politeness that can cause each player to temper his strengths. Salonen and Vengerov, however, demonstrated a more impressive kind of respect for each other by avoiding that. Each played confidently to his strengths, and the performance had a weird but extraordinarily convincing completeness to it, and a feeling that Brahms could be part of the late 20th century and still be good-old Brahms.

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Not surprisingly, Salonen picked Prokofiev’s boldest music in his half-hour’s worth selection of “Romeo and Juliet” numbers. Also not surprisingly, he made a spectacular show of these. It was surprising, however, that the orchestra sounded as vividly virtuosic as it does indoors.

New microphones and speakers seem to help. Early in the evening, we were still somewhat in the age of 78 rpm recordings, but by the Prokofiev the sound had improved more to the era of good late ‘50s stereo, which is not half-bad at all.

Now all that’s needed is to push the music more into our own time. If a large audience will so eagerly absorb Prokofiev made to sound modern, it need not fear, say, something like Salonen’s new piece, “L.A. Variations,” unfortunately not included this summer. But therein, one hopes, lies the future of the Bowl.