2023 Hollywood Bowl Classical Highlights
/By Truman C. Wang
8/20/2023
Photo credit: L.A. Philharmonic
John Williams in concert has been an annual Hollywood Bowl tradition since 1978. For this year’s concert, on July 8, they devised an elaborate setup with a full orchestra, a CSU Fullerton chorus and the L.A. Children’s Chorus, in a program filled with interest for classical music connoisseurs and moviegoers alike. In advance of the celebratory event, the L.A. Phil also put out highly collectible John Williams merch such as those designed by artist Dave Kloc. This year’s conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, himself a Hollywood celebrity, soon to be transplanted to New York, spoke minimally in his still-passable English, drew massive sounds from his sizeable forces, first in a medley of Hollywood classics, then a second medley of John Williams scores. The video montages and editing were good but did not impress like last year’s.
The second half of the program was all classic ‘John Williams conducts John Williams’, in between shouts of “We love you John!” from the audience. Now 91, John Williams is rare among Hollywood film composers who successfully crossed over from the silver screen to the concert stage, much as Erich Korngold had done before him. His latest serious composition, a violin concerto, was first performed last year with Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. At the Bowl this evening, he selected a few perennial favorites, including L.A. Phil’s concertmistress Bing Wang playing the “Schindlers List” theme, and a new symphonic suite from “Superman”. I noticed a new deepening and sophistication of Williams’ symphonic technique and harmonic language in the “Superman” Suite, where the familiar theme is refashioned and lovingly developed in small motivic fragments like a Dvorak tone poem. The evening ended, naturally, in the crowd-pleasing, lightsaber-waving “Star Wars” medley, except this year we saw delightful saber rattling by Williams and Dudamel.
Gustavo dudamel, leah hawkins (photo credit: L.A. Phil)
Dudamel returned three days later, on July 11, to conduct an impassioned performance of Verdi’s Requiem, with the steller L.A. Master Chorale. Here, a natural feeling for the Italian style brought music to new life. Dudamel showed an instinctive command – it is rare today, even in Italy – of the natural movement, the dynamic surge and ebb and flow, the unwritten but essential rubato of Verdi lines. The excellent soloists phrased freely and emotionally. Leah Hawkins, a young up-and-coming African-American soprano (slated for Santa Fe’s Tosca in August) floated warm, full lines and rose to a thrilling high C. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass, was urgent and vivid.
Conductor leonard slatkin, pianist makoto ozone
The next three concerts heard three pianists, as different in temperaments as they were in artistic sensibilities. Each program presented a different set of intellectual and technical challenges. On July 25, Makoto Ozone, from Kobe, Japan, tackled Gershwin’s familiar Rhapsody in Blue, but as a jazz pianist first, classical pianist second. The result was incredibly refreshing and fun. The usual cadenzas were replaced by long, extended sessions of jazzy improvisations with infectious riffs and licks that seemed to go off the rails at times but always managed to return with a wink and a chuckle. Conductor Leonard Slatkin and the L.A. Phil happily played Ozone’s jazz pickup band with great flair. A fetching and rhythmically stimulating new work by Cindy McTee (Slatkin’s wife) preceded the Gershwin and “kept the royalties flowing in the family” (as the maestro jokingly remarked.) Dvořák’s Ninth, following the Gerhswin, was excitingly and beautifully articulated by maestro Slatkin, and the famous English horn solo in the Largo played with chaste simplicity by Carolyn Hove.
Korean firebrand and 2022 Van Cliburn gold medalist Yunchan Lim made a big splash in Fort Worth, Texas last year and at the Hollywood Bowl on August 1. The program was the same Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, where Lim predictably opted for the more difficult of two cadenza versions. The “profound musicality and prodigious technique” in the 19-year-old Lim’s PR pronouncement were evident, but only after a somewhat unpromising start, where he was happy to tickle the ivories on autopilot until around the midpoint in the big cadenza, where he took off running like an Olympic sprinter (or “a hurricane from the Steppes” of a young Horowitz). What followed were a series of dazzling episodes that only got better with each passing climax. The Chopin C-Minor Prelude encore was very fine but could be more heartfelt. Korean conductor Shiyeon Sung’s reading of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances was satisfyingly stirring and lyrical.
pianist yunchan lim (L), eric lu (r.)
In stark contrast, 25-year-old Chinese-American pianist Eric Lu, who won gold at the Leeds in 2018, has been compared to Lupu and Brendel, two of the most profound thinkers of the Classical literature (Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert), and I can see why. Stepping in on the eleventh hour for the indisposed Hélène Grimaud, Lu chose to pay Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, the most cerebral of Beethoven’s five piano concertos – and he did so with a singular seriousness of purpose and playing of such high poetry that it took my breath away. Lu was as unflashy in his manner of playing and repertory choice as Lim was a showman through and through. The Steinway on this occasion also sounded fuller-toned and more rounded than on August 1 (I sat in the same box for both concerts.) For an encore, Lu played the presto finale from Chopin’s B-Minor Sonata and showed he could dazzle as well as the next guy. Conductor Ryan Bancroft, also making his auspicious Bowl debut, gave a witty reading of Caroline Shaw’s Entr'acte (a play on Haydn’s Op.77 No. 2 string quartet’s minuet), and a potent, very English Enigma Variations, summoning all the pump and circumstance (and a whiff of nostalgia) of the old British Empire in the famous ‘Nimrod’ variation.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.