Hollywood Bowl Offers Eclectic Season

The 1998 Hollywood Bowl season, which begins June 6 and runs through Sept. 16, will again offer a core, 10-week series of classical orchestra concerts, as well as jazz, pop, recitals, movie music and fireworks extravaganzas.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic will be in residence at the Bowl July 7 through Aug. 20, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the orchestra in four concerts highlighting music--including Salonen’s own “LA Variations”--that it will take on a European tour later in the summer. The Philharmonic’s Bowl performances open with revisionist conductor Roger Norrington venturing into new territory with the Mahler Second Symphony. Other guest conductors are Lawrence Foster, Jeffrey Tate, Marin Alsop and John Williams. Soloists include Van Cliburn competition winner Jon Nakamatsu, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt and violinist Joshua Bell.

The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, with conductor John Mauceri, will play 17 concerts, including the traditional Fourth of July fireworks concert and six other fireworks events, a Gershwin centennial tribute, a tango program, a Leonard Bernstein tribute with guest artist Sylvia McNair and additional vocal concerts featuring Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and Wagnerian soprano Jane Eaglen.

Visiting bands are the Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted by Ivan Fischer (five performances of Beethoven, Hungarian music and a Viennese weekend program), and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, led by Jeffrey Kahane, with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist in September.

Other programming highlights include Oscar Peterson, Grover Washington, Ray Charles and Orchestra and the Mingus Big Band in the jazz category; Gidon Kremer, with his ensemble Kremerata Baltica, playing Piazzolla; two gypsy events, the Gipsy Kings in June and the American debut of the Roby Lakatos gypsy band in August; Itzhak Perlman playing klezmer music; the Flying Karamazov Brothers; and a Bugs Bunny cartoon night.

New this year is the availability of “SuperSeats,” stadium seats that are being installed in three sections immediately behind the upper tier of box seats. They will be five inches wider than the bench seats they replace (and wider than box seats as well), with cushions, backs and armrests. At $30-$40 per ticket for series subscriptions, the seats in these sections will cost an average of $8 more than the bench seats adjacent to them.

Subscriptions for 10-, five- and three-concert series are available now. Single tickets go on sale in May; (213) 850-2000.