Live: The Hollywood Bowl opens its season with Josh Groban, Roger Daltrey and more
It was a chocolate and champagne sort of night at the Hollywood Bowl.
The festive mood at Friday's season-opening concert proved extra-conducive for enjoying those consumables from one's picnic basket, while, in a more fanciful sense, those flavors wafted on the air as cocoa-voiced Josh Groban and effervescent soprano Kiri Te Kanawa performed separate sets as new inductees into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.
As a double bill, these talents might have seemed an odd combination -- the 28-year-old boy-man who sends his female fan base swooning with a repertoire that is a bit pop, a bit classical and a bit world music, yet not really any of them, and the celebrated, ever-radiant 65-year-old opera star who's gone largely missing for more than a decade now.
Yet diversity is one of the qualities embraced by the Hall of Fame, which showcases performers who "embody the spirit of the Bowl," as Thomas Wilkins, the evening's conductor and genial emcee, explained.
Proof of that precept promptly materialized as the hall's first inductees, country singer Garth Brooks and composer-conductor John Williams manned a stage-side lectern to introduce this 10th anniversary Hall of Fame concert.
