Thomas returns, chopper doesn’t

Michael Tilson Thomas walked onstage at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night for the first time in 22 years and, with a twinkle in his eye, asked, “Now where were we?”

Let’s see. It was 1985. Hundreds of instrumentalists and singers were crammed beneath the then-intimate Bowl shell. Tilson Thomas -- he was not yet known as MTT -- was conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a battery of other forces in Mahler’s gargantuan Eighth Symphony. A police helicopter supposedly seeking a classical music-loving suspect circled low and deafeningly. The frustrated and frustrating young man on the podium, the Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor, broke his baton and stormed offstage. Not until threats to bill the police department for musicians’ overtime did the craft depart and the performance resume, half an hour later.

“It turned out to be a quite wonderful performance,” Tilson Thomas recalled several years later in a book of interviews. It wasn’t all that wonderful. Some bits were ordinary, others overdone.

But a lot has happened since. Tilson Thomas has lived up to all his early promise and become a great conductor. A year ago, he led an inspired Mahler’s Eighth with the San Francisco Symphony, where he has been music director for 12 years. And Tuesday at the Bowl, he put the joy back big-time in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the Ninth Symphony.

The shell is much larger than it was in 1985. Video now makes the expressive gestures of an anything-but-camera-shy conductor part of the spectacle. Every inch of the Bowl has lately become subject to assertive amplification.

Most important, what Tilson Thomas once called the “curse” of outdoor concerts -- “laid upon mankind by I don’t know whom” -- was, for at least this one night, broken.

Beethoven’s obstinate music has at its heart the overcoming of obstacles, and the legendary Beethoven the Hollywood Hills have absorbed over the years typically has had the character of powerful music hammered home in a hostile environment.

Tuesday, though, Tilson Thomas -- demonstrating good, even impish, humor -- took a different tack, fashioning a brilliant outdoor Beethoven’s Ninth with the Philharmonic, the Master Chorale and four spectacularly fresh American vocal soloists, a performance perfect for its time and place.

Tilson Thomas did clever prep work for the Ninth by beginning with little-known late Beethoven: some incidental music (the overture and three choruses) from a drama, “King Stephen,” about the Hungarian national hero, along with a chorus, “Bundeslied,” all about conviviality. The style of these pieces is similar to the Ninth, that great hymn to humanity and brotherhood, but the tone is more hale and hearty. During “Bundeslied,” with a text by Goethe, one could almost imagine drinkers in early 19th century Vienna clinking their glasses as they sang of wine and love and lunged for lasses. The performances by orchestra and chorus were infectious.

The Ninth was no-nonsense. Tilson Thomas didn’t bother to storm the heavens or make philosophical points. He knew where he was and that his audience was still clinking its wineglasses. The tempos were on the quick side; textures were light, transparent and tactile.

Rhythmic drive in the first movement produced a sense of urgency that never, for a split second, diminished through the 66-minute length. The Scherzo danced. Before the slow movement, Tilson Thomas mocked himself, cocking an ear to listen for a helicopter and then, without missing a beat, launching into a heavenly soft opening that built to a radiant refrain.

The soloists in the Finale might have stepped out of a John Adams opera: Jessica Rivera and Eric Owens were, in fact, the first cast of Adams’ “A Flowering Tree.” Owens -- whom I found not particularly impressive in Adams’ “Doctor Atomic” with the San Francisco Opera and who dominated, but not deeply, Elliot Goldenthal’s “Grendel” in Los Angeles -- has matured significantly in a very short time. Maybe he just needs a fabulous conductor, but his bass solo calling all of us brothers to the fields of Elysium was magnificent.

Rivera and mezzo Kelley O’Connor soared, and Philippe Castagner, a young Canadian tenor, was clean, clear and rapturous. The Master Chorale sang with brio. And the Philharmonic played with wonderful character. If the surrounding hills were already replete with memorable Beethoven’s Ninths, too bad. They had to find room at the top.

mark.swed@latimes.com