Berlioz and Bramwell Tovey make quite a pair

OUTSIDE of Canada, where he is based, and Luxembourg, where he was recently a music director, Bramwell Tovey has been typecast as a lightweight. The British conductor, who is music director of the Vancouver Symphony, also happens to be a fluent jazz pianist and a composer for such crossover groups as the Canadian Brass. He has a jolly way of speaking to audiences. In New York, he leads the Philharmonic’s Summertime Classics series of potboilers performed in “a festive atmosphere.”

Before Tuesday night, Tovey’s Hollywood Bowl resume was equally lightweight; he’s twice led the Tchaikovsky Spectacular. His limited discography is not substantial.

But time’s come for an image makeover. Like few others in his profession, Tovey has figured out the Bowl. In a stroke of pure inspiration, Tuesday he resurrected Berlioz’s “Grande Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale,” a spectacular score of forgotten outdoor music for orchestra, chorus and marching band.

That was more than enough to make this program, which will be repeated tonight, one of the Bowl’s rare great occasions. But Tovey also accomplished something maybe even more challenging: He began with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and, with a little help from his enemies, made that an occasion as well.

One does not start seriously at the Bowl. Audiences don’t settle in right away, nor does the sound system. Atmospheric conditions as the sun sets affect acoustics. Latecomers noisily stagger in. And on this occasion, an automobile alarm went off throughout the first-movement exposition and its repeat.

Fate did not knock on the door, as the symphony’s famous opening da-da-da-dum was described in Beethoven’s day. It honked, annoying everyone, even other annoyers. But suddenly, everyone was listening, and Tovey kept them listening.

He reminds me of a latter-day Thomas Beecham. Like the famed British conductor from the first half of the 20th century, Tovey has a crisp, unfussy touch and seasons his interpretations with engagingly bright and warm wind playing. Tuesday, he had the advantage of tart oboe solos from Anne Marie Gabriele.

But he also did special things with the strings. The Hollywood Bowl is usually about the big picture, not subtle details. It’s hard enough to hear, say, the violas in a great indoor acoustic, but Tovey managed to bring them out in the last movement with such freshness that he seemed almost a sleight-of-hand artist.

Tovey has an adventurous side. When he was music director of the Winnipeg (Canada) Symphony, he began a new-music festival, drawing cutting-edge composers and large and enthusiastic audiences to a very cold place in the dead of winter.

Adventure at the Bowl in pleasant summer weather is an even harder sell. But Tovey pulled off that miracle too with Berlioz’s astounding score, written for the 10th anniversary of the 1830 July Revolution in the Place de la Bastille in Paris. Though it was conceived for a huge brass band, Berlioz later added lower strings and chorus.

At the Bowl, the 100-strong Granada Hills High School Highlander Marching Band and Pacific Chorale joined the Phil for the moment of triumph at the end. Berlioz required a Jingling Johnny, a pole with bells and horsetails attached, originally used by Turkish armies to beat time and frighten women. The percussion section built its own.

The first movement is an immense 16-minute march, one of the grandest in all music. The second is a funeral oration featuring solo trombone; it was played with commanding eloquence by James Miller.

And finally the triumph. Berlioz was a master of magnificence, the grand effect, and nothing he wrote is grander than this. Goosebumps rose early, when the Highlanders first marched out in full regalia, and then just got bumpier.

Through it all, Tovey, who grew up among Salvation Army bands, was a genial commander in chief. He kept order and let the sentiment speak for itself. It did. Gloriously.

The Hollywood Bowl needs an artistic savior. It also needs a successor to John Mauceri, who is in his last season as music director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Isn’t the perfect candidate now obvious?