Movies, Marceau Give French Accent to Bowl

John Mauceri adopted the widest possible concept of French music in his “Vive la France!” concert at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday. Indeed, except for two pieces each by Ravel and Offenbach, you might have confused this event with one of his programs of soundtrack scores.

Here were idiomatic Hollywood Bowl Orchestra performances of music composed by Miklos Rozsa and Henry Mancini for films set in France, a Franz Waxman arrangement of Bizet for another film and the antique Jean-Joseph Mouret rondeau used as the theme for the PBS series “Masterpiece Theatre.”

The biggest miscalculation may have been allowing Gene Evans’ inventive fireworks display to obliterate the end of “Bolero,” music with a powerful payoff of its own, instead of the wretched symphonic suite from Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubil’s “Les Miserables,” a score that virtually begs for obliteration.

As usual, Mauceri’s leadership lacked interpretive insight, but the reflective performance of “Pavane pour une infante defunte” offered a welcome contrast to the bombast elsewhere. And concertmaster Bruce Dukov attended capably to the Waxman “Carmen Fantasy,” especially the bravura variations on the Chanson Boheme .

The concert marked the Bowl debut of the great French mime Marcel Marceau, with a large projection screen at the top of the shell making his every move visible to every seat--though, of course, the facial expressions in Marceau’s classic theater repertoire were not intended for huge close-ups. In this context, his action pieces (“Lion Tamer” and “Pickpocket’s Nightmare”) worked better than sensibility pieces (“Street Musician”), though even age, distance, the usual Bowl distractions and simultaneous video projection couldn’t diminish the magnificently stark walk through time, “Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death.”