Gripped in the clutches of a persistent heatwave, music-loving Angelenos had a difficult choice to make last Thursday. Stay bunkered down in their air-conditioned homes. Or defy the sweltering heat and choking traffic to make the trip to the Hollywood Hills for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s last Hollywood Bowl concert of 2012. Some 9,000 people opted to brave temperatures that felt just a couple degrees short of baking even at night. For most of them, the incentive of seeing and hearing Itzhak Perlman was, no doubt, an incentive to travel they couldn’t turn down. But at the end of the concert, one felt that the conducting of Bramwell Tovey was an equally good reason to have ventured to the Bowl.
A dash of paprika began the proceedings with the Tenth, Fourth, and Fifth Hungarian Dances of Johannes Brahms. Tovey’s readings were alert and crisp, yet digging into the music’s swooning Romanticism with playful rubati.
The dances were a prelude to the appearance of violinist Itzhak Perlman, who was met with a standing ovation before he played a single note. At 67 years of age, Perlman is no longer the technician he once was. His sense of pitch and rhythm are at times only approximate. But his sunny, Kreislerian style in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto played to his strengths: an ability to luxuriate in the music’s lyric power. This was especially evident in the Canzonetta, where Perlman weaved an impressive, songful spell; spurning the melancholy in the music in favor of a seraphic glow. The outer movements, if not crackling with electricity, unfolded with the all the leisureliness of a warm conversation—with some winding digressions—between friends.