FEATURE THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL: VAST YET INTIMATE

THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL: VAST YET INTIMATE

A concertgoer who sets foot in the Hollywood Bowl’s amphitheater for the first time is typically struck by the venue’s vast size. But a performer who stands on stage for the first time tends to remark on the opposite. Singer Mel Tormé put it succinctly: “The Hollywood Bowl with its thousands of seats is one of the most intimate venues in which I appear.”

MEL TORMÉ PERFORMING AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL

The most gifted and memorable performers in Hollywood Bowl history are those who could make the Bowl’s sprawling canyon feel like a friend’s backyard. It is a strange alchemy of musical ability, personality, and instinct that allows certain artists to captivate and endear themselves to a Bowl audience. Successful conductors have tended to possess a striking stage presence, an ability to roll with the punches, and musical tastes that transcend genre. These conductors and their orchestras have shared the stage with soloists and singers whose stars have shone no less brightly. Soloists have similarly relied on outsized personalities, an appeal that bridges musical styles, and the star power to hold the attention of 18,000 fans. For most of Bowl history, conductors and guest artists managed this feat without the assistance of video screens, and the earliest ones did it without amplified sound.

Dozens of world-renowned artists have made their North American debut at the Hollywood Bowl—and more than a few of them have described it as a career-defining moment. There is also a handful of artists whose charisma has helped to shape the Bowl, bringing with them new genres and formats. Above all, the women and men who have become a part of the Bowl’s legacy are the ones who achieved that special connection between audience and performer that is both the cause and the efect of the Bowl’s most surprising feature: its intimacy.

After Alfred Hertz’s tenure as music director in 1922, a series of famous European conductors made the long trip west, by sea and train, to perform at the Hollywood Bowl through the decade. The who’s who of conductors included Emil Oberhofer, Sir Henry Wood, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Eugene Goossens, Pierre Monteux, and Bruno Walter.

Conductors typically were put up at the rustic but charming Hollywood Hotel at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, just south of the Bowl. There, they hobnobbed with Hollywood’s elite, including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin, who rarely missed a Bowl show in those years. Conductors were treated as celebrities, their personalities and predilections written about by the local press. The Los Angeles Times marveled at Bruno Walter’s mostly raw diet: “He had a special breakfast dish which he prepared himself by soaking oatmeal 12 hours, adding lemon, milk, raw apples, and nuts.”

Before they could win over audiences, however, conductors had to win over the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra. The morning rehearsals under a hot summer sun, limited rehearsal time, and the demands of Bowl audiences for sophisticated, varied repertoire put pressure on many conductors. The members of the orchestra could help them succeed but were known to have

fun with pretentious conductors in rehearsals. Gabrilowitsch remarked: “They act like devils in the morning and play like angels in the evening.”

Italian maestro Bernardino Molinari raged in rehearsal in 1928 when he thought the orchestra was not taking the music seriously enough. At one point, he threw a chair of the stage. That night, however, the orchestra (and audience) wowed Molinari with their dedication to the music.

Others fared less well against the “devils.” In the third season of Symphonies Under the Stars, Ethel Leginska became the first woman to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl. Leginska electrified the Bowl audience but enraged the orchestra players. Leginska said she found prejudice among the Bowl’s players against “a woman shaking a stick over them.”

As critic Isabel Morse Jones described in her Hollywood Bowl history, “Leginska’s blue-green eyes grew black with fury at the orchestra’s implication that she could not conduct Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. That night, she found 25,000 people back of her, and a rebellious 80 in front. She subdued them all, even playing a Weber piano concerto and domineering over the orchestra at the same time. She knew her scores, some of them being of her own composing, and her temperament did the rest. The men never forgave her her success.”

However, they did learn a lesson, because they treated Antonia Brico, the next woman to conduct at the Bowl, with much more deference. Despite Leginska’s success in 1924 and Brico’s in 1930, women conductors at the Hollywood Bowl remained a rarity for decades.

For its first two decades, the Hollywood Bowl was a venue dedicated to “high culture,” including operas, religious services, classical music, and Shakespeare. In fact, there was tremendous reticence toward opening the Bowl up to other types of “popular” entertainment. Ultimately, it was the star power of a few performers and their throngs of fans that changed what was acceptable for the Bowl’s stage.

The Hollywood Bowl and the Los Angeles Philharmonic were on shaky ground financially going into the 1937 season and were looking for a show that could raise a significant amount of revenue. Oscar Levant, a piano student of Arnold Schoenberg, told conductor Otto Klemperer that if he wanted a blockbuster concert, there was only one man to turn to: George Gershwin, a young composer who had recently come to Los Angeles to do work in motion pictures. Though exceptionally popular, Gershwin was not taken seriously by classical musicians in the United States. Nonetheless, Klemperer arranged a meeting.

BRUNO WALTER CONDUCTING ON THE STAGE OF THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL IN 1947.

Photo used courtesy of the Otto Rothschild Collection

CONDUCTOR ETHEL LEGINSKA

“No conductor dare play down or program down to a Hollywood Bowl audience. They are neither bored by the classics nor shocked by the moderns. But they are ever eager for new music. Most of all they demand quality throughout, and while they share with all Americans the love for the spectacular, they refuse to accept it as a substitute for art. … Nowhere else in all the world can such a combination be found; a vast natural auditorium … an earnest, intelligent, sympathetic audience … a rich and generous city.”

—BERNARDINO MOLINARI

PROGRAM COVER FROM A GEORGE GERSHWIN MEMORIAL CONCERT IN 1937. THE FANCHONETTES PERFORM DURING GERSHWIN NIGHT AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL

IN 1950. Photo used courtesy of the Otto Rothschild Collection

Though Klemperer found Gershwin arrogant, he was charmed by the young composer, calling him “a cheeky fellow.” Sadly, a Gershwin performance at the Hollywood Bowl was not to be. The composer fell into a coma and died of a suspected brain tumor at the age of 38. A blockbuster Gershwin program did happen at the Bowl that summer, though. Instead of a showcase of the composer and pianist, it was a memorial concert held on September 8, 1937. Millions of Americans tuned in to CBS Radio to hear the star-studded program.

Klemperer began with Gershwin’s Prelude No. 2, arranged as a funeral march. Lily Pons sang “Summertime.” Three original Porgy and Bess cast members performed other excerpts from the Gershwin opera. Bowl regular José Iturbi conducted Rhapsody in Blue from the piano. Oscar Levant and Charles Previn—great-uncle of André Previn—divided the tasks on the Concerto in F. Fred Astaire sang Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to one of the last melodies George ever wrote: “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”

The Gershwin memorial concert, with its mixing of jazz, opera, orchestral music, and movie stars, exemplified what would become the Hollywood Bowl’s aesthetic—a mixing of “high” and “low” art. Gershwin and the Hollywood Bowl would become forever connected in the minds of American music lovers. The connection helped elevate Gershwin’s legitimacy as an American artist and shape what the Hollywood Bowl would become.

After the Gershwin memorial, succeeding years brought increasing variety—and controversy—to Hollywood Bowl programming. In 1939, Benny Goodman appeared at the Bowl— arguably the first jazz performance in the history of the venue. The debate between what was “popular” and what was “good” came to a head in yet another financially strapped year, 1943, when the world’s most in-demand star performed a benefit concert for the Bowl: Frank Sinatra. It was the first time a popular “ballad singer” had appeared alongside an orchestra in Los Angeles.

Because of wartime restrictions, only 10,000 adoring fans could attend the Bowl debut of Sinatra that summer. At the time, he was two years into his solo career and on the verge of becoming one of the most recognized recording artists of his generation. One writer summed up the atmosphere at the Bowl.

Sinatra’s smooth-toned voice made the Bowl feel as intimate as ever, and the box-ofce receipts helped right the Bowl’s finances. However, the controversy raged on for the rest of the summer. Letters pro- and anti-Sinatra appeared in newspapers for weeks. The Los Angeles music impresario Andrae Nordskog wrote to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: “Is the name ‘Sinatra’ synonymous with the ideals responsible for the establishment of the Hollywood Bowl? Or, in other words—to where are we drifting?”

In the end, however, Sinatra and “popular” music won out—he would be invited back every year for the foreseeable future. In his wake, singers like Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, and Bobby Darin followed. Cole, in particular, became a frequent collaborator with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, singing and playing the piano as Nelson Riddle conducted the orchestra alongside Cole’s trio. In his first five engagements with the orchestra, Cole drew a combined audience of more than 95,000 music lovers, and his shows came to further refine the concept of an orchestra pops concert, now with a popular singer at its center.

“From the moon-bathed tiers of venerable Hollywood Bowl, last night came the inconceivable—hysterical screams, pleading, sighs, whistles, endearments, gasps, agonized cries. … But all had one emotion in common— their feverish devotion to the little juke box johnnie, best expressed in the screams and cries and whistles that welled up from the amphitheater when Frankie fi nished each number. … All in all, it was a big night, best expressed by one breathless babe: ‘He sends me—and he leaves me there.’”

—MARVIN MILES

FRANK SINATRA MAKING HIS BOWL DEBUT WITH THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC IN 1943. Photo used courtesy of the Otto Rothschild Collection

ELLA FITZGERALD PERFORMING AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL.

“Of all the jazz concerts I have given, I can’t recall in any the quiet thrill I experienced when I looked across the water that separated the Hollywood Bowl shell in which the musicians were to play and the more than 20,000 people who attended the concert. Suddenly, I felt that after all the talk, and true talk it was, about ‘jazz and the smoke-filled rooms’ and jazz’s roots in the work fields and the brothels, it was wonderful that evening to see that jazz finally found a proper place for itself, a sort of new dimension, where it could move great masses of people emotionally, and in a way, beautifully and peacefully.”

—NORMAN GRANZ

The Bowl’s most popular and enduring singing star, however, was neither Cole nor Sinatra. It was Ella Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald holds the rare distinction of having sold out the venue in each of fi ve decades, from the 1950s through the 1990s. Her ability to make the largest venue feel like the most intimate space changed what was possible for the Hollywood Bowl.

Fitzgerald, already an internationally touring artist, made her Bowl debut in August 1956, alongside Louis Armstrong. Legendary jazz impresario Norman Granz produced the show, recorded it, and released it on a double album titled Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl.

In his liner notes, Granz credits the magic of the Bowl as the key to the concert’s success, but listening to the album makes it clear that it was Fitzgerald who lit the fi re that night, bringing her joy, her passion, and her humor (at one point imitating Armstrong’s gravelly voice) to the

event. The Los Angeles Times sent its classical music reviewer, Albert Goldberg, to cover the program. Goldberg was at a rare loss for words to encapsulate Fitzgerald’s gifts: “We asked an aficionado how to describe her and the rapturous reply was, ‘Just say she is the most!’ We will go right along with that.” Goldberg added, “It was something like a cataclysm of nature and it had a tornadic efect. … Miss Fitzgerald alone was worth the price of admission.”

As jazz’s popularity in American music dipped in the 1970s, Fitzgerald continued to keep the flame alive, until the uniquely American genre found a permanent home at the Bowl with the inauguration of the Playboy Jazz Festival in 1979.

Fitzgerald, who lived in Los Angeles, was always eager to get back to the Bowl either at the Playboy Festival or at the LA Phil’s Jazz at the Bowl series, which began in 1980. Anne Parsons, former general manager of the Hollywood Bowl, recalled: “There were a lot of people who wouldn’t play outdoor venues, but they would play the Hollywood Bowl. Ella Fitzgerald, right down to when she could barely walk out on stage, made sure she played the Hollywood Bowl.” When she tripped and fell on stage in the middle of a 1986 concert, the full house of 18,000 gasped in unison; Fitzgerald had undergone a quintuple bypass surgery only a few months prior. Fortunately, she had just lost her footing. From the floor, she looked out to the audience and quipped, “People can really say, Ella fell for them,” before jumping right back into her song.

When Fitzgerald died in June 1996, it was the weekend of that year’s Playboy Jazz Festival. The event morphed into a two-day celebration of Fitzgerald’s legacy. Fans put up a banner near the Bowl entrance that read “ELLA WE MISS YOU.”

By the 1990s, the Hollywood Bowl’s performance calendar had expanded to six nights per week. The demands on the Los Angeles Philharmonic were tremendous: the orchestra not only performed its own concerts but also collaborated with artists ranging from Fitzgerald to Garth Brooks to The B-52s.

So, in 1991, a second, completely distinct ensemble—the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra—was created.

John Mauceri, appointed the HBO’s first principal conductor, went on to lead the ensemble for 16 years and 323 concerts. Mauceri had already served as the director of the Washington Opera, the Teatro Regio in Turin, and the Scottish Opera. He struck the perfect balance between the “high” and “low” music that a Bowl conductor needs to command.

Mauceri did not just found a new orchestra; he built the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra into a premier ensemble with strengths all its own. Since many of the players were studio musicians who recorded film and television soundtracks, they were some of the most heard but least visible musicians in the world. The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra changed that. With Mauceri, they toured to Japan and recorded more than a dozen albums. Mauceri recalled, “The music was enormously complex. We had to choose the dream oboist, trumpeter, and concertmaster … who could lead the Shostakovich Fifth and Animaniacs.” After Mauceri stepped down in 2006, the LA Phil took nearly two years to find the right person to replace him.

Growing up in an urban housing project in southern Virginia, Thomas Wilkins realized at the age of eight what he wanted to do with his life. His mother had taken him to a concert in Norfolk, where the young Wilkins heard the orchestra play “The StarSpangled Banner.” Watching the conductor shape the sound with his arms seemed like magic to him. Wilkins resolved then and there to dedicate his life to music. Since becoming principal conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in 2008,

CONDUCTOR JOHN MAUCERI MAKING HIS DEBUT WITH THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL ORCHESTRA IN 1991.

CONDUCTOR THOMAS WILKINS BANTERS WITH KERMIT THE FROG DURING THE MUPPETS TAKE THE BOWL IN 2017.

Wilkins has begun every concert with the same piece that inspired him in the first place. The LA Phil’s leadership had approached Wilkins for the job because, like Mauceri, he possessed the ability to thrive in any genre of music. As Wilkins put it, “I’m a firm believer in no-labels music, and the Bowl is just like a giant version of how I live my life. We opened a couple of years ago with the “Sacrificial Dance” from The Rite of Spring, then we had John Legend and Stevie Wonder on. And the first thing Stevie said to me backstage was, ‘Man, that Stravinsky was rocking!’”

In addition to his artistry, Wilkins brings a unique charm to the Hollywood Bowl, harking back to conductors like Alfred Hertz, who established an immediate rapport with the Bowl’s audience. Wilkins addresses the audience between pieces, improvising based on the feeling of the evening. “There are some nights when I’m a professor, and there are other nights when I’m a comedian.”

The position of Creative Chair for Jazz was conceived to curate the Hollywood Bowl’s jazz shows. Renowned vocalist Dianne Reeves, who talks about growing up in the “living school of jazz,” became the inaugural creative chair in 2002. Reeves cites the Bowl as the place where she learned her greatest lesson.

Reeves was succeeded as creative chair by Christian McBride, who handed the role to Herbie Hancock in 2010. All three have worked hand in hand with Hollywood Bowl General Manager Laura Connelly, who was hired in 1999 to help bring new artists and genres to the stage. Connelly worked with radio personality and producer Tom Schnabel to create a world music series in 1999. Most at the time thought world music was for a niche audience and required smaller, more intimate performance spaces.

Schnabel went before the LA Phil’s

“It was at the Playboy Jazz Festival. [Vocalist] Sarah Vaughan was performing after [jazz fusion band] Spyro Gyra. They finished their set, and the stage spins, of course, at the Playboy Festival, to bring on the next act. The people were just up out of their chairs, the sun had just gone down, and the atmosphere was buzzing. When I saw that Sarah was next, I thought ‘Wow, this is going to be interesting.’ And so, the stage spun around, and there she was on stage singing very low, ‘Summertime,’ and the audience was still kind of going crazy over Spyro Gyra. The sound of her voice. Just, oh so sweet. The fragrance just started to permeate the whole Bowl, and I watched that entire Bowl just be completely quiet. And as they got quiet, she got louder, and then it was just magic from there on. And then I thought, that was the greatest lesson I ever learned. It doesn’t matter. Be you; do you at all times.”

—DIANNE REEVES

Board of Directors to make the case for bringing world music to the Bowl: “I put on a suit and tie and stood in front of these very serious-looking board members. Not a one of them cracked a smile, and I thought we were done for. What won them over was when I made the argument that there’s a lot of languages spoken here in Los Angeles, something like 200 languages, and the Hollywood Bowl should represent the speakers of each of those languages. And music is a good way to bridge cultures and also represent the diverse populations of Los Angeles.”

The series was an immediate success. KCRW signed on the following year and has maintained its sponsorship of the KCRW World Music Festival (now the KCRW Festival) ever since. When Indian singer-composer A.R. Rahman made his Hollywood Bowl debut in a sold-out Bollywood Night concert in 2006, thousands of spectators streamed in late. “It was actually a wonderful sign,” Schnabel recalled. “Because it meant that there were so many people who had never been to the Bowl before. Once inside, though, you could feel the energy, and the connection, and the magic, and I don’t think that could have happened anywhere but the Hollywood Bowl.”

No matter the genre, the Hollywood Bowl’s most efective concerts are those that foster a deeply personal connection between artist and audience. In the words of Thomas Wilkins, “Once the sun sets, you can’t see the audience anymore. But you can feel them. You know they are there with you in that magical place.”

DIANNE REEVES

Excerpted from Hollywood Bowl: The First 100 Years by Derek Traub edited by Julia Ward and Robin Rauzi © 2022 Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, reprinted with kind permission of the author.