Copland Adds Some Spice to Philharmonic’s Summer Fare

Thursday night at the Hollywood Bowl, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s musical recipe amounted to a late summer’s picnic. The program lacked neither meat nor dessert, but leaned toward the latter. Familiar tunes flitted through the sparse midweek crowd, whether the tried-and-true, boisterous charms of Dvorak’s Three Slavonic Dances, Opus 46, Nos. 1, 4 and 8, or Alexander Borodin’s eminently hummable “Polovtsian Dances” from the opera “Prince Igor.”

Conveying a spirit so lighthearted that even the crowd’s occasional inappropriate applause seemed forgivable, guest conductor Leonid Grin led an able and willing Philharmonic through an evening that mostly wove between Russian and American fare. The program took pains to appear painless, from the garden variety swoon of Glazunov’s Concert Waltz No. 1 to the pleasing urbane sashay of Three Dance Episodes, from Leonard Bernstein’s musical “On the Town.”

Under these deliberately buoyant circumstances, one expects little in the way of epiphanies, and one solid musical pillar is sufficient to hold such a program together. That came courtesy of Copland’s spicy Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp and Piano. Commissioned by Benny Goodman in the late 1940s, the solo honors here were dispensed masterfully by the orchestra’s principal clarinetist, Lorin Levee, who deftly supplied the opening theme’s supple plaint and the whirlwind finale’s syncopated--though not necessarily jazzy--muscularity. As with most of Copland’s best music, subtle tensions and key dissonances salted the stew and kept things on this side of sentimentality. On this evening, in this al fresco space, it fell under the worth-the-price-of-admission category.