A violinist retires, a conductor debuts

One musician made an exit and another an entrance at the final Los Angeles Philharmonic summer season concert Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl. Violinist Tze-Koong “T.K.” Wong, who joined the orchestra in 1963, was playing his last program, Philharmonic President Deborah Borda announced from the stage.

He had performed, Borda said, at the inauguration of three venues (the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Walt Disney Concert Hall and new Hollywood Bowl shell), gone on 51 tours and played 4,000 performances.

Wong received warm applause when he made his entrance after this introduction, and we could see him, sitting among his first violin colleagues, perhaps more frequently than usual on the Bowl’s giant video screens.

Meanwhile, Edwin Outwater, resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, was making his Bowl and Philharmonic debuts. Direct and economical in his gestures, Outwater, who looks as if he could be almost as much at home on the gridiron as on the podium, might be easy to underestimate. That would be a mistake.

He started the eight-part Russian program with an intelligent, sensitive reading of Tchaikovsky’s “Marche slave,” typically a hoary, throat-clearing chestnut. Four selections from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” emerged with rare dramatic effect. The superb playing of the Philharmonic had something to do with this, of course.

The conductor, 30, brought out the aching beauty of the Pas de Deux from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” and the wit of Shostakovich’s “Tahiti Trot” (“Tea for Two”). As a bagatelle, he resurrected Alexander Mosolov’s short, futuristic fantasy “The Foundry,” a clanging ‘20s paean to the Machine Age that today seems impossibly naive.

Outwater is essentially a lyrical conductor, and it was lyricism that he stressed as he accompanied Alexander Toradze in Prokofiev’s percussive Piano Concerto No. 1. Toradze, for his part, knew when to dazzle with steel and when to seduce with velvet.

He played two encores, the third movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata and a Scarlatti sonata in D minor, joking before the latter that helicopters flying over the Bowl had obscured his performance of it 25 years earlier. A helicopter flew over Thursday too, but it passed out of earshot before the quiet second half of the piece.