Violinist Joshua Bell dazzles a packed house at Benaroya Hall

With supernova violinist Joshua Bell as visiting soloist, Sunday afternoon at the Seattle Symphony promised to be a glittering one. Benaroya was packed. Anyone who came for a bit of stardust got a veritable deluge.

Berlioz's Overture to "Beatrice and Benedict" was seized by the audience like cotton candy, a sweet fluffball that melted against the ear and was instantly forgotten.

Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" Fantasy Overture is a piece everyone knows, even if they don't know they know it. The eight, quivering fulsome notes of the lovers' melody have become a romantic cliché, immediately recognizable to anyone who's seen a clip of two lovers running in slow motion towards each other in a field of flowers.

Most of the audience was probably a bit puzzled by the depressing setting that familiar phrase is found in: The piece begins enshrouded by gloom, with mourning clarinets and grumbling cellos. It takes an awfully long time — about 10 minutes of dirge — before the torpor is shaken off. The orchestra gradually revs to full force to rendezvous with the violas that surge up to introduce the famous melody, before being carried off to fluttering heights by bird-like flutes.

Since everyone knows how this particular story of doomed love ends, it's no surprise at all when the lover's melody is transposed into an anguished, frantic finale, accompanied by the ominous thudding of timpani.

The other two pieces of the night were interesting studies in musical cross-dressing: In Rimsky-Korsakov's "Capriccio espagnol" and Lalo's "Symphonie espagnole," respectively, a Russian and a Frenchman attempt to sound Spanish. Rimsky-Korsakov pulled out every trick in the book in the Fandango: gypsy violins, whistling piccolos, strutting castanets, swoony harp-runs. I half-expected a toreador hat to materialize on maestro Gerard Schwarz's head.

Joshua Bell soloed with the Lalo, after all that frippery. It wasn't exactly a hard act to follow, but so much of the music had been studded with rhinestones that, at times, his showy star turn could have been mistaken for tinsel, too. Especially since he never hesitated from pouring on the glitz.

A striking, tall figure dressed in black, Bell swayed like a bullfighter as he played his sweet-voiced Strad. After effortlessly nailing one of the showiest opening runs ever written for a violin, he plunged into the bathos of the opening Allegro and embraced all the campiness of the tango runs in the Intermezzo.

The moments of gauzy delicacy he brought to the famous Rondo, with its heavy embroidery, made me wonder what the night might have been like had he performed something a little less obvious. Then, again, maybe that's not the way to play to a full house. He got his ovation, and the audience got its encore: another dazzler, Henri Vieuxtemps' acrobatic take on "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Souvenir d'Amerique.

Sumi Hahn: sumi@bewodo.org