Dausgaard Works Wonders as Conductor at Bowl

Each week at the Hollywood Bowl this summer, a different conductor from a different country leads two classical programs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Thus far, he (they are all “he’s”) has been an American, a Brit, a Japanese. Tuesday, he was a young, handsome and gifted Dane.

But unfortunately for Thomas Dausgaard, who has a reputation for championing his native music, the Bowl’s mandate requires recycling old favorites from the standard repertory. It may have been a missed opportunity not to have asked him to conduct, this Bach year, Danish composer Per Norgard’s plucky “Bach to the Future,” which he has recently recorded. But that hardly seemed to have bothered Dausgaard, who also has a wide range of musical interests.

In fact, he plucked Franck’s muddy old Romantic-era vehicle, the D-Minor Symphony, from near the bottom of the hit list, put it through the carwash (Armor All on the tires, spray wax, the works), and then proudly displayed it at the beginning of the program as if it were the musical equivalent of the shiny new Lexus that the orchestra prominently exhibits by the ticket stalls as pay-back advertising for corporate support. (It is rare to attend opera or symphony anywhere in America these days without seeing a new car out front--there is also a Lexus at Lincoln Center this summer.)

Putting Franck’s long, heavy, serious, self-important and sometimes turgid symphony at the beginning of a Bowl program looked, on paper, like the dumbest idea of the season. Picnickers are invariably caught unawares by the concert’s start. Something loud, snappy, unimportant and short is required to settle down the crowd; a break is also needed to seat latecomers. Yet here was a long symphony, which begins with a slow, somber and quiet introduction, viscous as the cloudy evening’s humid air. Latecomers had a full 40 minutes in which to examine the Lexus while waiting for intermission.

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They also had all the more reason to bemoan the clogged traffic on Highland Avenue. Dausgaard didn’t quite achieve the impossible, but he came close enough, often enough, in a committed, exciting performance to lift underrehearsed orchestra, fidgety audience and incredulous critic alike out of midsummer doldrums. People paid attention, players came to life, and Franck sounded downright impressive.

Dausgaard, who was a conducting fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute in 1991 and is now music director of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, presided without a score and engaged the orchestra in an excavation of drama and color underlying the symphony’s muck and bombast. There were the inevitable dull patches that not even Furtwangler or Bernstein could do much with, and not every detail this time around was finely polished, but the performance had an enthralling sweep overall, a rhythmic energy and powerful direction that made an unusually excellent case for the symphony. Small, fragile instrumental delicacies in the middle movement were most threatened by the great outdoors (the crowded skies over the Bowl buzz worse than ever with small aircraft) and iffy amplification, but even here there was a surprising amount to savor.

In reverse of the typical program order, Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto was played after intermission, and then the short, flashy (but not unimportant) work, Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe” Suite No. 2. Louis Lortie, a dry Canadian pianist who concentrates more on structure than poetry, was miscast as Chopin protagonist.

Dausgaard, however, was never less than arresting. He may have overreacted in attempting to supply some of the missing character to the Chopin performance (here the orchestra sounded unprepared), but in Ravel he highlighted the vivid and delicate coloration of the ballet score and whipped the orchestra into a properly orgiastic, yet precisely controlled, frenzy. Dausgaard returns to the Bowl tonight with Beethoven and Brahms.