BOWL

Old Sebastian Bach lived a lifetime without hearing a note of his
“Brandenburg” Concertos. There’s no information, in fact, that anyone — in
the castle of the Brandenburg nobles or anywhere else — heard these works in
their own time. Contrast that with the 7,549 souls privileged to sit through
all six of these iridescent scores at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday night, and
you may suspect that, in some ways at least, the world has improved somewhat
since Bach’s time.From any angle these are remarkable works. They constitute a compendium, first
of all, of some of the best devices of Baroque instrumentation: the use of
solo instruments against a larger ensemble, and the ways that ensemble can be
subdivided to present an infinite variety of sonority. They also offer a fair
study of the moods, the rhythms, the virtuosity of players available to
composers in the year 1721. Each of the works draws an entirely different set
of rules and expectations. An evening of all six “Brandenburgs” becomes an
adventure in glorious excess.One might raise doubts, even so, about the fitness for this music in so vast a
space as the Bowl, performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in groups
ranging in size from six players to 30. Truth to tell, the sound pattern
wasn’t always kind to Bach’s invention. The horns in the first concerto were
undermiked so that their marvelous rhythmic patterns of threes against the
other players’ twos weren’t always audible. The harpsichord in several works
was overmiked almost to the point of drowning out the ensemble. Nobody ever
claimed the Bowl as an ideal Baroque music venue, and nobody should,Yet there was vitality in iona Brown’s approach to the music, and high
expertise in the way her ensemble did her bidding. Sometimes, in truth,
vitality won out over repose; much of the music — the marvelous, burbling
fantasy of the fourth concerto, to cite one instance — went by so fast, and
with so little inflection, that it sounded smaller than life, even in its
larger-than life setting. Often as not, Brown’s conducting seemed to suggest
that she didn’t like the music very much, a most peculiar attitude if true.