Under the Moody Moon

Pleasant, shirt-sleeve temperatures. A full moon. Rachmaninoff and nothing but. Democrats downtown and their protesters tying up police helicopters. No music-attacking chop, chop, chop; rather just the plush sonic carpet of crickets, to which music sticks like acoustic Velcro.

Tuesday was the kind of soft, tropical night for which the Hollywood Bowl was made. And Rachmaninoff fills the Bowl perhaps like no other composer. There may be a deep gloom in his music, the embodiment of Russian melancholy. Only the death-obsessed Rachmaninoff would, in his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” find in a chipper eight-bar theme an ominous link to a medieval chant for the dead, the “Dies Irae.” The Second Symphony, the other work on the program, has the character of a great psychological storm, the mind buffeted between suspiciously overemphatic cheer and dark, near-suicidal doubt.

Yet at the center of both works, Rachmaninoff stops time and turmoil with melody. In the 18th variation of the “Rhapsody” and the Adagio movement of the symphony, melody is so compelling that, Tuesday night, it seeped into every corner of the vast outdoor arena. It is melody for which we are unprepared, even having heard these popular pieces hundreds of times, in concert and as the lush and sentimental background for countless movies. Rachmaninoff’s gift is their surprise; the tempest of life peels away and, for a while, we enter a new, reflective world.

The performers on Tuesday night understood the time-stopping qualities of these moments. In the “Rhapsody,” a work for piano and orchestra, the 18th variation belongs to the pianist. After considerable virtuosic dazzle and pianistic interplay with the orchestra, the orchestra seems to vanish and the pianist suddenly is in the spotlight. The drama is great, and the soloist, Nikolai Lugansky, relished it. This young Russian prizewinner has, as far as one can tell from amplification, a silvery bell-like tone and a brightly percussive manner. He is not sentimental, and he has technique to burn.

But neither he, nor the conductor, Enrique Diemecke, seem made for slow music. For both, slow music feels like fast music deferred. In some forms of Asian thought, it is supposed that every object has in it a spirit that is released, as sound, through vibrating the object. And it may be that all musicians, likewise, have in them an inner tempo. Lugansky made the 18th variation not an interlude of sweet lyricism but a glimmering view of distant space from a fast-moving satellite. Still, it was a beautiful effect and suited the Bowl.

The Mexican conductor, who is best known for spirited performances of music by his native composers, led Rachmaninoff’s sprawling symphony from memory and with animation. He conducts without a baton. Here he favored the complexity of individuality in orchestral playing over lock-step unity.

That may have allowed for some uncharacteristically raucous playing from the Philharmonic and much freedom in the balance of sections (again, in so far as could be determined from amplification), almost as if the performance were a protest against discipline. But then Diemecke, who is a candidate for the music directorship of the Long Beach Symphony, may also have been reacting to yet another reality of performing at the Bowl.

With rehearsal time at a premium, he offered spontaneity. His conducting style includes an excited flailing of the arms, and the orchestra was on edge and encouraged to play out rhythms with uncommon vivacity and to ensure that climaxes were Wagnerian. The music-making was anything but perfect, but neither is life, and it was a pleasure and a marvel for an evening of Rachmaninoff to bring us closer to life than cliche.