Finding joy and glory in Mozart at the Bowl

So Mozart doesn’t make you smarter after all, some researchers now tell us. They’ve done tests and found that the “Mozart effect” was promoted to sell books and CDs to pregnant women gullible enough to hope that by slavishly playing “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” while they washed dishes, they might produce Mensa babies.

Tuesday night, thousands of us attended an all-Mozart concert at the Hollywood Bowl. We heard two wonderful symphonies and a terrific violin concerto. We left with no discernible IQ improvement. But it was a good concert, and it will be repeated tonight.

The conductor, making his Bowl debut, was Bernard Labadie, a Canadian who formed the popular early music group Les Violons du Roy and who has recently been making a name for himself in opera. Earlier this summer, he was widely and rightly admired for his animated conducting of Handel’s “Orlando” at Glimmerglass.

Once past a glum, de-spangled version of the national anthem (a comment from north of the border?), Labadie was all bounce and vigor in Mozart’s symphonies Nos. 34 and 41 -- both in bright C major -- and the Violin Concerto No. 3. The soloist was Martin Chalifour, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s outstanding concertmaster. The Philharmonic was reduced to the chamber size that would have been typical in Mozart’s day, and it played with what sounded like unalloyed joy.

Only eight years separate the two C-major symphonies, but they are probably the most important eight years in the development of the genre. No. 34, written in 1780 when Mozart was 24, is brash, full of spirit and cleverly scored, but it is a rudimentary, three-movement work. No. 41 (the “Jupiter”) was Mozart’s last, and it blazes glory in its expansiveness, in its deliciously rich instrumental textures, in the deep emotion of its slow movement and in its sheer power of invention.

Labadie conducted both with great theatrical flair. For the first, which opened the program, that was exactly what was needed to settle down the audience.

There is more intensity to the “Jupiter” than Labadie brought out on this occasion, but the performance was graciously phrased, full of life and drama. Balancing an interpretive approach informed by period-practice methods, he kept the textures lean and the tempos fleet. But he also expertly accommodated the needs of modern instruments. In Mozart, you can be too thin, and this wasn’t.

The balancing act between period and modern practice proved particularly impressive in the concerto. Chalifour -- who also happens to be French Canadian -- is a sophisticated, modern player. His tone is never huge and romantic but is still larger than what you would hear from a period player. Labadie fit the orchestra’s sound to the soloist’s, and Chalifour, clean and elegant, knew exactly how to sonically mesh with his colleagues.

Yet, happy an occasion as this was, something was wrong. This year’s aggressive amplification has received much favorable comment, but on Tuesday, I found it ugly and unmusical. Everything could be heard, but nothing sounded right; strings developed a harsh metallic tinge, and the engineers seemed to fight the conductor in balancing the different instrumental sections. The microphones sometimes even picked up individual string players, and one heard not blended sound but screwy effects.

The ear is adaptable, and after a while it adjusts. But in the Finale of the “Jupiter,” when a violist dropped a bow, it made such an electronic thud that it proved a jolting reminder of this artificial acoustical environment. At that point, I wasn’t sure that maybe we aren’t all a little gullible in thinking there can be a genuine Mozart effect at the Bowl.