Los Angeles Philharmonic

The Hollywood Bowl, yet again, became a beacon for helicopter pilots Sunday night. But then there was a grisly murder in the Hollywood Hills to check out. A hunchback, who was not really a hunchback, took out a contract on his daughter's lover, a lothario. The job went awry. The young woman was stabbed instead and discovered by her father as she lay dying in a garbage bag. Which is to say that Gustavo Dudamel chose "Rigoletto" for his annual Bowl opera with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

During the sultry days and nights of his Venezuelan youth, Gustavo Dudamel constantly heard the masters' music blasting from radios or pouring out of Caracas nightclubs and concert halls: the jazz-inflected salsa of Eddie Palmieri, the merengue-bachata fusions of Juan Luis Guerra and, of course, the Afro-Cuban and Latin pop philosophizing of Rubén Blades. Although the burgeoning classical conductor was consumed with absorbing Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler, he also was internalizing the tropical rhythms that were his hemispheric birthright.

Was Tuesday the perfect night at the Hollywood Bowl? The Los Angeles Philharmonic lineup was cellistYo-Yo Maand music director Gustavo Dudamel. The evening was enchantingly mild, with soft air serving as a beguiling musical conveyance. The program contained two Romantic era favorites: Schumann's Cello Concerto and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. The 18,000-seat amphitheater was sold out! Nothing is perfect, however, when it comes to outdoor concerts and this venue. All the usual irritants could be counted upon - Hollywood traffic, picnickers blithely crunching potato chips and toasting themselves while Ma and Dudamel poured out noble emotions, helicopter nuisance, the compromises of amplification.

Somehow, Beethoven at the Bowl makes for an ideal, sympathetic pairing of site and sound, if the past two seasons are an indication. Last year at the Hollywood Bowl, Itzhak Perlman performed admirable double-duty, as violin soloist and guest L.A. Phil conductor on themes of the popular Fifth and the deliciously quirky Eighth Symphony. Thursday at the Beethoven-endowed Bowl, the violin feature and symphony components were boldly led by the gifted young Frenchmen, violinist Renaud Capuçon and maestro Lionel Bringuier, with the Violin Concerto in D, Opus 61 and the rousing good time of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. As before, Beethoven's majesty, profundity and ear-warming familiarity rang out expansively in the Bowl's night air, also proving a resilient enough musical force to endure inevitable sonic intruders.

Q: Why is a viola bigger than a violin? A: They are the same size. It's just that violinists have bigger heads. It's probably safe to say that there are fewer jokes about violinists than 7-Elevens or mothers-in-law. Still, Los Angeles Philharmonic principal concertmaster Martin Chalifour was game to throw this one out at his San Marino home, looking forward to Tuesday's performance of the Julius Conus Violin Concerto at Hollywood Bowl with guest conductor Stéphane Denève. Chalifour calls the Conus piece "a gem of the Romantic repertory," adding: "I have made a point of learning a new piece for every solo that I do. I've done it more than 30 times in L.A. " The occasion for the joke was trying to coax a smile out of Chalifour for a photo.

While the city's television producers gleefully tally up the Emmy nominations earned for flagship shows such as "Breaking Bad"  and "Game of Thrones,"  the Los Angeles Philharmonic also has something to crow about. An L.A. Phil program was nominated Thursday in the outstanding special class category, for the PBS broadcast of Herbie Hancock and Gustavo Dudamel joining in a concert to celebrate George Gershwin, which opened the 2011 season at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Airing under the banner of PBS' "Great Performances" series, the show was co-produced for broadcast by New York City's WNET and is going up against some stiff competition.

This post has been updated. Opening the Los Angeles Philharmonic's summer season at the Hollywood Bowl with Beethoven's big Ninth Symphony on Tuesday night, the conductor Leonard Slatkin told the audience that this hallowed score, a symphonic overcoming of suffering, is an almost annual event in the amphitheater. In fact, it's more a special occasion. Its performance at the Bowl three years ago is a hard act to follow. That was Gustavo Dudamel's media-frenzied free concert that began his L.A. Phil music directorship and gave a whole new meaning to the "Ode to Joy" that famously ends the symphony.

The extraordinary advances in film technology over the past few decades have given us elves and hobbits, dinosaurs and Na'vi, thrust us into Quidditch matches and the streets of Dickens' London. But nothing that has been done with hand-helds or a green screen can hold a digital candle to the extraordinary rise of nature cinematography. For the past decade, nature documentaries have been capturing life in a raindrop and death in a butterfly's wing, reminding us that fact usually trumps fiction, that beauty and meaning surround us and that high-definition television really was a great idea.

Before Monday night's show with Barry Manilow, the first of three fireworks-punctuated nights at the Hollywood Bowl culminating with Independence Day, one question came to mind: What does a Barry Manilow crowd look like in 2012? After nearly 40 years of massive pop hits and even a few memorable commercial jingles (the insurance company that's "like a good neighbor"? That's Manilow), the answer should have been obvious - the crowd looks like you, me and just about everybody else.

NEW YORK - Last month, Gustavo Dudamel ended his third season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a splash - a venturesome staged performance of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" in a great space (Walt Disney Concert Hall) and the world premiere of John Adams' Passion opera, "The Gospel According to the Other Mary. " Friday night, it was the New York Philharmonic's turn. Alan Gilbert ended his third season as music director with a venturesome staged excerpt from "Don Giovanni" (the first-act party scene)