MUSIC REVIEW : Stepping Out : Hollywood Bowl Orchestra Debut a Giddy, Festive Pops Extravaganza

Independence Day concerts are a tradition of some standing at Hollywood Bowl, though not always in the pops-fireworks mode. Tuesday, the mantle fell to the recently reincarnated Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, in its first concert appearance.

The pops tradition is a long one, even in this country--the Boston Pops claimed its first century in 1985. On the basis of its debut concert and previously released CD, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra is a worthy, if hardly radical, heir.

Indeed, given the nature of the family audience and the continued dining throughout much of the performance, the event recalled descriptions of the early European promenade concerts in which American pops shows have their roots. The experience was a tumultuous one, long before the fireworks.

It was also a genuinely festive, celebratory experience, and a surprisingly communal one. With repeat performances Wednesday and tonight long sold-out, the turnstiles admitted another 13,155 Tuesday, a crowd that conductor John Mauceri quickly made one convivial family.

Mauceri introduced the music with affable wit. More important, he chose an Americana program that was nicely paced, reasonably varied and made musical as well as patriotic points.

More important still, he got his orchestra to project it all with exuberance and flair. As delivered through the Bowl amplification system, the sound was alive, though emphasizing the bass end of the scale and submerging the strings.

The system--which always needs tuning up at the beginning of the season--also did not do full justice to the firm and versatile baritone of Bruce Hubbard, either in balancing him with the orchestra or in sound quality. Hubbard gave much character to five of Copland’s “Old American Songs,” while tussling a bit with Mauceri over tempos.

Hubbard also intoned Bernstein’s “Simple Song” with fervor and clarity, and presented what he announced as the premiere of “Home Blues,” a song version of themes from “An American in Paris.” He brought down the house with his passionate, orotund “Ol’ Man River,” though singing with more subtle inflection in “All the Things You Are.”

There was nothing subtle about his full-throat and heart “God Bless America,” or its blowzy accompaniment, swelled with a synthetic chorus. Tackiness struck again at the end of the first half, in a “Star Wars” suite that ended with a scripted pseudo-encore of the Cantina music, replete with dancing spotlights.

The Irving Berlin chestnut did serve to set up the red-white-and-blue Sousa fireworks orgy that closed the concert, although Mauceri added another Gershwin song arrangement in between. At first, atmospheric conditions threatened to turn the fireworks into a coughing catastrophe, but then the wind blew out, and yes, we could see the bombs bursting in air.

Following a slow National Anthem, the proceedings began with Gershwin’s overture to “Strike Up the Band,” appropriate but intermittently untidy. The overtures to “Candide” (Bernstein) and “Show Boat” (Kern) in the second half displayed the band to much better effect.

The rest of the agenda included a spunky “Hoe-Down” from Copland’s “Rodeo,” the expansive “Dances With Wolves” excerpt from the orchestra’s “Hollywood Dreams” CD, and a sassy, kinetic “Times Square” from “On the Town.”