Midsummer Rachmaninoff Completes Bowl’s Pattern

Several common threads weaving through the Hollywood Bowl season converged Thursday night: the close of the cycle of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra, the third all-Russian program in the last four Thursdays and the second time this week that the Romeo and Juliet theme was invoked (“West Side Story” on Tuesday was the first).

And it’s worth noting that every piece was written in the 20th century, a first for a weeknight this summer and a reminder that, contrary to rumor, there is an abundance of audience-friendly music from the last 100 years.

Though it lacks big, sweeping hit tunes, Rachmaninoff’s underrated Piano Concerto No. 4 grows on one, especially its brooding urban Largo based on three notes, quite different from the other concertos.

This year, the longer original edition is being revived in concert and on CD, but pianist Jeffrey Kahane--on a busman’s holiday from the L.A. Chamber Orchestra--played the usual revised version in a lean, restrained, clearly etched manner free of languorous drift or excess sentiment.

Like most of her colleagues, guest conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson takes the first movement of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony much too slowly; it loses most of its fun and wit at such a sluggish pace, and it casts a pall on the rest of the piece. But with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in very good midsummer form, a suite from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” ballet whizzed by as Wilson conveyed some tragic power when needed, though not enough force in the concluding “The Death of Tybalt.”