The Ives-Mahler connection

THE Hollywood Bowl ambience is changing. On Tuesdays, a tasteless new corporate sponsor promotes itself with tacky hard-sell T-shirts it forces upon ushers and parking lot attendants, and it litters the seats with its brochures. The program book now attracts the attention of gushing Realtors for the super-rich, including a full-page ad for a $65-million Beverly Hills estate.

How much longer before ads appear on the giant video screens, before music simply won’t matter in this large picnic ground?

Happily, the answer to that last question was put off Tuesday night when Leonard Slatkin appeared to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Ives’ atmospheric “Three Places in New England” and Mahler’s anguished Fifth Symphony. Slatkin is in his first season as principal guest conductor of the Philharmonic at the Bowl, and his assignment, as far as I am concerned, is to put some zest back into the classical programming.

He needs more influence, of course. The Bowl should have a music director. But however much clout Slatkin does or doesn’t have, he was able on this occasion to remind us a bit of what the Bowl was like when it was a more revolutionary place.

In 1933, for instance, Nicolas Slonimsky, who led the world and West Coast premieres of the “Three Places,” conducted eight weeks of Ives and other living composers at the Bowl. More than 70 years later, “Three Places” is some of the most modern-sounding classical music that will be played this summer.

Slatkin began by speaking to the audience, pointing out the connections between Ives and Mahler. Ives was the American composer who caught the attention of Mahler when Mahler was music director of the New York Philharmonic early in the 20th century. Mahler planned to premiere Ives’ Third Symphony but didn’t live to do so.

Ives’ score evokes moods. It somberly lingers over a Civil War monument to African American Union soldiers, works up a Revolutionary War fervor and lingers over a mystical fog that descends on the Housatonic River.

Slatkin was straightforward. Ives gives the ear many choices of what to listen to at any moment, and the conductor didn’t impose any extra. The engineers supervising the amplification made some choices of their own. But this is egalitarian music, so that was fine. But how Ives, a wealthy insurance man with high principles, would chafe at those T-shirts from his clueless successors.

Slatkin’s Mahler felt curiously old-fashioned. He does not seek the concentrated intensity favored by such modern Mahlerians as Michael Tilson Thomas and Simon Rattle, nor does he go in for the determined modernity that Esa-Pekka Salonen and Pierre Boulez reveal in this composer who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, looking forward and back at the same time.

If Slatkin can seem retrograde, however, he is not nostalgic (even though both Mahler and Ives never lost their personal nostalgic streaks even as they broke new musical ground). His performance reminded me of Bruno Walter, more accepting than demanding, never lingering but never pushing.

There were no revelations. There was excitement in the ferocious passages -- no competent conductor can make Mahler unexciting -- but not undue excitement. The poignant central Adagietto was heartfelt but not heart-on-sleeve. The final movement, in which all the preceding anguish explodes into disturbing obligatory merriment, sounded neither obligatory nor particularly merry.

In many ways, this was not Slatkin’s Mahler so much as our Mahler. A listener brought to it what seemed right for him or her. At times, I found myself too readily drifting off or too easily angered by obnoxious aircraft that quiet passages attracted this night the way a flame does moths. But at other times, Slatkin seemed to be a gracious guide to the music’s emotions, making them available. He didn’t force them down our throats but nonetheless left room for a lump.

The orchestra played well -- not as if inspired but capably enough that Mahler could still matter and Ives’ spirit still live. Big business can’t take that away. At least not yet.