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
rmpits. 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
o 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
rchestra. 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.