S.F. Ballet Gives Spark to Tchaikovsky Concerts

“Absolutely no smoking in theater,” reads the sign at the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl seating area--and that message was repeated over loudspeakers just before the annual “Tchaikovsky Spectacular” on Friday. However, nobody seems to have told Bowl special-effects consultant Gene Evans and the staff of Pyro-Spectaculars, for their fireworks assault near the end of the “1812 Overture” blanketed the box seats in a thick, noxious haze that evoked the Battle of Borodino far less than a poison gas attack in World War I.

Some box-holders immediately fled as if war had indeed broken out in the Cahuenga Pass. Perhaps the evening’s miniaturized burning of Moscow had been the type of fireworks they’d expected: colorful Fourth of July sparklers behind a row of cutout onion domes at the sides of the shell. Nothing Tolstoian in scale or intensity. But when the top of the Bowl seemed to catch fire from cannon blasts exploding behind the shell, and the descending smoke obliterated any trace of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and conductor John Mauceri, some of us feared the worst: that disgruntled music lovers had decided to revenge themselves for seasons of mediocre performances and cutesie-poo anecdotes with an act of massive retaliation.

False alarm. When the smoke cleared, Mauceri appeared un-smudged, unfazed and ready to launch an abridged “Waltz of the Flowers” that sounded just as deadly in its rhythmic inflexibility and avoidance of Tchaikovskian nuance as the “Swan Lake” entrance of the guests (Act 3) and the “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy played during the smoke-free portions of the program.

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The big news of the ’97 “Tchaikovsky Spectacular” turned out to be balletic: a danced “Swan Lake” at the Bowl after a lapse of nearly 27 seasons. With the orchestra crammed against the back wall of the shell, a thin margin of forestage became available to the three principals and 24 swans of San Francisco Ballet, presenting Helgi Tomasson’s 1988 adaptation of Act 2 in costumes designed by the late Jens-Jacob Worsaae.

Seen at full length a year ago at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Tomasson’s version achieves a standard of classical elegance in the dancing of its swan corps that no regional ensembles and few national ones have matched. But he proves less artful as a storyteller, turning Rothbart into a delirious lunatic and diluting many of the plot’s moments of high drama. There are no hunters in his staging of Act 2, for example, so the passage in which Odette begs the prince to protect the swans now takes place with just one crossbow onstage--and only one arrow.

On Friday, the corps again looked exemplary and the four, large cygnets--Megan Low, Lindy Mandradjieff, Elizabeth Miner and Michelle Wilson--moved in perfect unison until a final, mistimed drop to their knees. The great Cuban firebrand Jorge Esquivel gave Rothbart maximum force while French principal Cyril Pierre brought a feverish expectation to the role of Siegfried: the feeling that this night would change his life.

As in Costa Mesa, Pierre’s emotional heat and his partnering prowess helped enhance the dancing of Joanna Berman, an Odette with plenty of skill to display but not much majesty or freshness. Small-scaled dramatically, she yielded to Siegfried’s love almost imperceptibly in the White Swan pas de deux and looked no more than smoothly prosaic in her adagio solo.

On Saturday, Yuan Yuan Tan of China and Vadim Solomakha of the Ukraine made their debuts as Odette and Siegfried. Disconcertingly, he closely resembled Ben Wright, the second-cast Prince in the radical Matthew Bourne version of “Swan Lake,” and also delivered the Wright stuff interpretively: a lightweight, boyish portrayal underpinned by secure technical skills. She, however, looked like nobody else anywhere, floating through the role with perfect classical placement, a gorgeous stretch and a ravishing gestural delicacy that made the conventionalized pantomime seem newly wondrous, as if it were being executed underwater.

Both sets of principals suffered from the unnaturally slow tempos that Mauceri enforced along with the strange passivity of his conducting: the sense that the notes you’re hearing never connect to form an overall shape or go anywhere in particular. That’s no great problem when he’s bashing away at the “1812 Overture” ’midst the rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air--with the USC Trojan Marching Band along for extra heft.

It’s a very great problem, indeed, in “Romeo and Juliet,” which becomes alternately bombastic and impenetrable in his hands: scraps of arbitrary effects unloaded at random with energy galore but not the smallest, slightest idea of how they can add up to something coherent and involving.