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8 September 2004
The Hollywood Bowl
Last evening, Chaitanya and I went to the Hollywood Bowl to attend a performance of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Tickets to the concert were subsidised by Caltech and cost us a paltry five dollars (instead of $16). We had resolved to take the bus and I anticipated at least an hour's ride in a packed bus stepping in and out of freeways into alleys and marts but I was in for a pleasant surprise. It turns out that the Hollywood Bowl has events only in the summer (the reasons for which shall shortly be evident) and definitely every Tuesday evening then. So the Bowl organises chartered buses that ply between the different suburbs into Hollywood for the concert. We were in the first such trip. Aboard the bus, I noticed that it carried a sign indicating seats reserved for senior passengers and disabled but it was the species of people under the age of thirty that was threatened and I felt seats ought to have been reserved for the two of us instead. Nonetheless, being quite early for the concert, we managed to get seats without having to ask any of the majority to budge. We were also the only two not of white complexion. It felt like being in an old-age retirement home picnic tour in Florida.Chaitanya courteously offered to be my guide, this being my first trip remotely close to a sightseeing expedition of the city that I live in. We ventured through the Los Angeles zoo that was hidden behind a hill, downtown vaguely translucent from within its private coxcomb of smog and fumes and head offices of a host of media corporations. Once inside the Bowl, we were given directions to make our exit at the end of the program and locate our respective buses that drove back to the different suburbs. The Bowl is built on a hill in Hollywood. It probably has a separate pincode and a mayor too, judging by the number of people working in its environs. Myriads of the locals arrived in flamboyant, light summerwear with picnic baskets intricately woven in cane and varnish. The single was an aberration as most came with spouses with the exception of a few Asian-Americans who came with their children -- doubtless budding pianists anxious to observe fingerplay at the Bowl. There was a very cavalier and jolly atmosphere which was unusual for me as Western classical music concerts go but this after all was, in Jim Hacker's acerbic words, "their work's outing".
Having a little more than a full hour left to go before the concert was to begin, we strolled into the Hollywood Bowl museum which was quite a revelation. The museum housed several memorabilia and artefacts dating back to the beginnings of the Bowl in the Roaring Twenties. The original shape conceived for the bowl was a split-pyramid structure in the manner of the Mayan temples in South America and Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's son, was entrusted with the job of building the theatre. But within a matter of two years, the shape was quickly modified to the present-day quadrant. And only last year, further structural changes were effected to enhance the acoustics of the amphitheatre. At the museum was also a rich repository of historical facts about the Bowl as well as audio and video clips that had any connection to it. My own personal link to the Bowl up until yesterday was the famous Tom & Jerry cartoon, "The Hollywood Bowl" where Tom is a conductor literally upstaged by Jerry. The music that played was the beautiful Die Fledermaus by Johan Strauss Jr. This and a Bugs Bunny cartoon that I had not heard of (where Bugs gets even with one of the male tenors) also featured amongst the video anecdotes relating to the Bowl. Amongst the audio pieces were Robert Clary's hilarious In the 88th Row of the Hollywood Bowl, Ella Fitzgerald's unambiguous Too Close for Comfort, candy for the Sixties crowd -- Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand and finally Bob Dylan's debut single Blowin' In The Wind that he wrote and recorded at the age of 21 in 1963.
To give one a rough idea of the sheer magnitude of this architectural marvel, the Bowl itself is in the shape of a hemispherical quadrant at least a hundred metres high and the seats rise up covering roughly one-half of the entire hill out of which the area was carved out. We were seated at least three hundred metres away from the foot of the shell horizontally and possibly vertically. Our seats were part of the rows intended for the Plebeians. The aristocracy paid for and sat around little dinner tables with their picnics packed and smelling of caviar, smoked salmon and sandwiches. Our rows smelt of cheap alcohol and shoddy perfume masking the sweat squeezed out of exposed women's armpits. In tune with the pitch of the concert and our own positions, if you would excuse the double whammy pun, rosy pink as a hue for upper vestments was the order of the day. I ran out of fingers to account for the women who deemed themselves unique and particularly attractive in their rosy pink outfits and brunette hair colours.
The concert featured two pieces -- Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major and Gustav Holst's The Planets. Cho-Liang Lin was the featured violinist for the violin concerto and given that the Star-Spangled Banner played at the start of the concert I had an altogether predictable déja vu reminding me of the Olympics. The concerto was executed nearly flawlessly and since I was quite familiar with the piece I enjoyed it thoroughly. The few obligatory words about the performers -- Cho Liang-Lin was quite adept at the violin though I personally thought Ju-Young Baek was a far more spectacular performer and a stunner to boot with her incendiary tricolour outfit that still numbs my eyes. The second piece, to me, was an utter disappointment. Gustav Holst apparently tried to imbibe as much as he could of each planet's attributes into the corresponding piece but what I missed out was the very existence of attributes of so inanimate and colossal an object as a planet. It is all very fine for the artists and composers to come under the influence of LSD and astrology but to palm their effect on to skeptics and ignorant dolts alike is laughable. Even though we could distinguish between the different themes of the many movements, it was hard to correlate them to the planets they were intended to symbolise. It also reinforces my theory about modern day composers who, in spite of their looks that demand reverence and sympathy, conjure up feeble compositions in an effort to dissociate their genre from that of the century before and only end up as necessary props to provide an excuse for a barren hundred years of musical asphyxia. An alternate explanation which I am reluctantly willing to acquiesce to is that most of the music of The Planets has been squandered away meaninglessly in different insignificant settings of an unspeakably large number of movies. Understandably, the respective music directors are mere collage artists that peruse collections listed and sorted perhaps in the order of moods and connotations and so find it most expedient to lift passages directly from compositions such as The Planets to describe UFO landings, sharks swirling, staircases creaking and hand-kerchiefs salting.
Fortunately, I did not have to give too much of my time or ear to the discordant notes of The Planets. There was instead wholesome entertainment provided by the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra for that evening -- Giancarlo Guerrero who if my memory serves me right, was making his first appearance at the Bowl and as part of the Orchestra. Mr Guerrero is endowed with a rotund upper body padding up a huge frame -- an attribute so conventional and hence in copious supply amongst conductors. But Mr Guerrero is additionally equipped with nimble lower limbs, an imaginative mind that purports to innovate with every single note made at the call of the baton a novel gesture combining the flailing hands twirling, chopping and twisting the hapless blades of air with the knees that pirouette swiftly and the toes that beg to stand on tips as the entire body hops, skips and jumps to avoid superstitions surrounding the closing notes. At times, Mr Guerrero was doubly more benevolent and in a moment of supreme comprehension that his front antics were being relished only by a select few on the stage, he would vigorously shake his large posterior in a hunched position that gave those seated immediately a more visceral share of the pleasures on-stage.
On our way back, I concluded that the Bowl probably has been pampered as the darling patronage basin of the entire American film industry when I noticed that there was a separate entrance into the 101 freeway from outside the Bowl.
