Careful work yields artful construction

The Los Angeles Philharmonic came up with another winner Tuesday when 26-year-old Frank Huang made his Hollywood Bowl debut in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto. Nicaraguan-born conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, 35, music director of the Eugene (Ore.) Symphony, led the orchestra.

The wide-open spaces of the Bowl may not be the best place to hear a work that depends on muted subtleties for so much of its opening movement or on intimate reflections for its second. The fireworks in the finale, however, certainly carry.

Making judgments through amplification also has its dangers. Even so, it seems safe to say that Huang has poetry, warmth and virtuosity to spare. He built and shaped phrases with intense expression, and his commitment was visible to all thanks to those giant screens at the side of the stage. Huang is already a prizewinner, taking firsts at the 2003 Naumburg Foundation Violin Competition and the 2000 Hannover International Violin Competition, and making his New York recital debut in 2004. We will hear much more of him.

Guerrero, who made his Bowl debut last year, substituting on five days’ notice for Miguel Harth-Bedoya, proved a careful, self-effacing conductor. He built climaxes effectively, but he -- or the engineers -- allowed quieter details to evaporate.

He turned in a much more exciting, finely tuned post-intermission performance of the concert version of Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” especially the rollicking, foot-tapping Coachmen’s Dance. The work has abundant moments for showcasing individual players or sections. Here again the projection screens -- and much improved camera work -- helped the audience focus on just who was doing what and, incidentally, how much work can be involved in making music, the latter becoming especially evident whenever one could see the flying hands of pianist Joanne Pearce Martin.

Guerrero opened the program with Stravinsky’s early “Fireworks,” a pungent, five-minute evocation of a pyrotechnics display written for the marriage of the daughter of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s main teacher. Guerrero will lead a program of Tchaikovsky and Copland tonight at the Bowl.