Review: Peter Gabriel at the Hollywood Bowl

The veteran British artist -- one of the select few in the pop music world to whom the term “artist" is wholly appropriate -- brought his orchestral tour to the Hollywood Bowl on Friday and demonstrated once again his completely inspired command of the medium of live performance.

Theatrics in pop concert tours all too often translate into gratuitous technology that merely occupies the eye while the hits play out. Gabriel's holistically conceived show weds the expansive musical vocabulary provided by the ensemble dubbed the New Blood Orchestra with images on multiple video screens designed with the same informed creative spark that made him one of the original geniuses of the MTV age.

His nearly three-hour performance was divided into halves: the first devoted to a front- to-back performance in sequence of his “Scratch My Back" album, the second to orchestral reworkings of a dozen songs spanning his 33-year solo career.

Gabriel employs various media not to dazzle for the sake of dazzling, but with the working knowledge of how music, words and images deployed in harmony can open the door to new awareness by simultaneously engaging the senses, the emotions and the spirit.

The “Scratch My Back" album, on which he has offered distinctive takes on favorite songs created by David Bowie, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, the Magnetic Fields, Randy Newman, Arcade Fire and others, has divided fans and critics. Some have found his approach rewardingly fresh, others have groused that the full-bodied orchestral treatments nonetheless lack the rhythmic bite that's been the hallmark of so much of his own work. In concert, however, it seemed obvious that Gabriel had the live aspect in mind all along.

As on the album, Gabriel opened with Bowie's “Heroes," which set the theme of leaving behind the ordinary and entering a different, higher realm, at least for one evening. Where Bowie's version built with an electro-rock pulse, Gabriel and the orchestra brought a regal sonic swell that embodied Bowie's idea that “I can be king/And you can be queen...just for one day."

An expansive video screen that spanned about two-thirds of the Bowl's stage, enough to obscure the orchestra behind it, displayed a sequence of horizontal lines moving up as the screen itself raised. Soon a batch of vertical white lines joined, moving gracefully in tempo with the music, only Gabriel's voice indicating his presence on stage until the screen was high enough to reveal the humans -- all wearing black -- behind it.

Reed's “The Power of the Heart" nodded to “Ol' Man River" as he sang “You and me we sweat and strain" in that wonderfully gritty, soulful voice of his.