Review: Bramwell Tovey savors ‘Music and Humor’ at the Bowl

After experiencing Bramwell Tovey as a regular guest conductor and quipster in chief at the Hollywood Bowl all these seasons, you knew he would be right at home in a program called “Music and Humor.”

That’s what he has been doing all along to some extent, only on Thursday night, it had an official label.

And run with it he did — right off the bat with a topical jab directed to an empty chair.

Tovey then took on a masterwork of musical humor, Richard Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” leading the audience by the hand through the piece at the piano from beginning to end. He is a more mischievous teacher than, say, Leonard Bernstein was but just as illuminating, and his deliberately paced performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic brought out as much detail as the sound system would allow.

Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals” was equipped with Ogden Nash’s text — and who better to do the narration than Tovey himself, who savored the outrageous rhymes with British relish. Inon Barnatan and Benjamin Hochman were the duo pianists, rippling away smoothly for the most part, though not always in sync with the orchestra or each other.

For the remainder of the evening, Tovey took a back seat on the podium to the antics of Igudesman & Joo (violinist Aleksey Igudesman and pianist Hyung-Ki Joo), who have racked up millions of hits on YouTube.

Humor can be a personal thing, and quite frankly I found a lot of their stuff tedious, especially the overlong song about Bessie the cow (there’s better material on YouTube). The one really funny bit they brought to their Bowl debut was a slapstick routine on Rachmaninoff’s C-sharp-minor Prelude in which Yoo compensated for the composer’s notoriously big hands with custom-shaped wooden planks.

The Philharmonic participated cheerfully — and the video screens were definitely needed to let the customers in on the action.

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