Big Portions of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff

“Schmaltz” is a Yiddish word for those little glistening globules floating around on the top of chicken soup. In its broader meaning, denoting excess and sentimentality, there was a lot of it floating around the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night.

First came the 16-year-old violinist Sarah Chang and her high-cholesterol reading of Tchaikovsky’s (ever-present) Violin Concerto. Then British conductor Mark Wigglesworth reprised Rachmaninoff’s artery-clogging Second Symphony. It all went down easy enough, depending on your appetite for this sort of thing.

The classical music world is a funny place. Young soloists come along by the hundreds and, instead of playing something different, play the same music as all the other young soloists. Every violinist phenom has to play the Tchaikovsky Concerto. It’s not a piece of music anymore; it’s a proving ground.

The results are performances like Chang’s--where the point is to play faster, slower, louder, softer and goopier than everyone else. Overdone by a mile, the music became just so many notes to manipulate to show her prowess. She applied huge amounts of portamento (those slippery slides between notes) and milked every emotive phrase to the max, either with fat, throbbing vibrato or with quivering, breathless pianissimos.

Nor was it always pretty--she threw herself into some virtuoso passages with such aggression that it taxed her instrument. She left nothing to chance. She even physically projected the moods, in case you didn’t catch them by ear.

After intermission, Wigglesworth, music director of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, led the Rachmaninoff (as he had five months ago in the Music Center). Outdoors, his highly nuanced and firmly directed interpretation lost something--the detail wasn’t as evident.

Still, the conductor has an obvious affection for the score, and it roared and thumped and heaved and sighed and weeped enough for a dozen tear-jerkers. No one ever said the work was subtle. It’s schmaltz, in fact.

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Mark Wigglesworth leads the L.A. Philharmonic in Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 and Violin Concerto No. 5 (with soloist Alexander Treger), and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 tonight, 8:30 p.m., Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., $1-$75. (213) 850-2000.