Bowl’s Fireworks Series Starts With Bang

The annual 10-weekend summer fireworks series in Cahuenga Pass began auspiciously Friday night with predictably colorful but surprisingly subtle visual thrills that used the musical background of Ottorino Respighi’s handsome “Pines of Rome” suite. There is no way not to be enthusiastic about such a show of changing brightnesses, visual pops, flying flames and whirling lights.

The music lived up to the eye-pleasing show too. Before and during the fireworks, conductor John Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra gave mostly delightful, apprehensible performances of a program called “Roman Holiday.”

Canny, astute and amusing, Mauceri’s informal spoken program notes illuminated this wide range of music by Rozsa, Tiomkin, Khachaturian, Puccini, Wagner, Zimmer, Morricone and Rota, all of whom have ties to the Italian capital.

Besides the “Pines,” the best playing emerged in excerpts from works by Wagner (the “Rienzi” Overture), Rota (“Amarcord” and “La Dolce Vita”) and Morricone, represented by the extended violin solo from “Cinema Paradiso,” played with vigor and poetry by Bowl Orchestra concertmaster Bruce Dukov).

There was also much to enjoy in the scene from Khachaturian’s ballet score, “Spartacus,” and in music from Hans Zimmer’s score to this summer’s “Gladiator.” That score, as well as the overtures from Miklos Rozsa’s “Julius Caesar” and Dimitri Tiomkin’s “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” received world-premiere concert performances.

American soprano Carol Vaness, making a belated Hollywood Bowl debut, sang arias from Puccini’s “Tosca” and “Gianni Schicchi,” and Giordano’s “Andrea Chenier,” as well as an excerpt from Yeston’s “Nine.”

Unfortunately, Vaness has arrived early to that point in her career at which inconsistency and strain intrude on vocal delivery. As noted in recent operatic appearances in both Los Angeles (“La Rondine”) and San Francisco (“Don Giovanni”), those sustained high notes do not float, neither do they ring. She sings well, but the bloom, alas, is gone. She was assisted gallantly by Mauceri and his able band.