Beethoven gets taken for a ride

A summer Beethoven concert at the Hollywood Bowl is like Shakespeare in the Park: It’s more important to project widely and with great passion the spirits and virtues of epic creativity than to hit every note in a newly inventive way.

Which is why the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Jeffrey Tate struck gold Tuesday by hiring Gil Shaham to perform the Beethoven Violin Concerto: The New York violinist by way of Israel -- a fiddler some call the young Itzhak Perlman -- has, in his short time, become the ultimate performer for this environment. And that’s a compliment despite the gripes of critics on perpetual searches for an ever strange, artistically unusual interpretation of the classics.

On Tuesday, Shaham began the Beethoven with great casual flair, letting his mensch-y personality shine through the bevy of linear scales and arpeggios that bear the weight of the work’s sonorous harmonies. His affectionate take on the second movement’s tender love themes contrasted well with the joyful mischief he made powering the bouncy third and final movement to its conclusion.

Only occasionally did Tate rein in too tightly Shaham’s Romantic, summer-friendly vision -- forcing him to conform to a more rigid metronomic structure and sometimes inspiring his orchestra members to hit cadences before their soloist. Still, nothing could upstage the violinist’s smooth technique, golden sound and unabashed delight for making music both refreshing and emotional. Some soloists play warhorses with high-art, roller-coaster extremes, and the erratic mood and tone shifts are hard to stomach. Shaham hits musical roads like a finely tuned Porsche, taking turns suavely and shifting from high gears to low with uncommon ease. When he’s finished, you wish you could take just one more ride.

It is hard to say the same, however, for Tate’s performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. He drew impressive lyricism from the oboes and clarinets in the work’s introduction, and he found movingly transparent textures in the work’s funeral march-like second movement. Still, he took that movement way too fast to really communicate its inherent drama, and his typically brisk, neat and layered conclusion seemed just that: typical (and, at times, sloppy).

More impressive was the Bowl’s microphone placement and production: Because Tate does, in fact, bring out lines in classic pieces that often go hidden, it was finally possible to hear some of the real inner-voice turmoil that makes this potboiler of a symphony cook.

Summer, after all, is the time to let it all hang out, and Tate could have taken a cue or two from his star soloist on that count.