BOWLORCH

[*] laby2;p1205. By Alan Rich [B] Daily News Music Writer [B]On a blessedly rainy day last week, 85 musicians gathered for a recording
session in a Culver City sound studio. If the sight was familiar enough, the
circumstances weren’t. It was, in fact, the inaugural gig of a brand-new
orchestra. It hadn’t yet given its first live concert, and wouldn’t for several
months. Its members had never even played together, for that matter, before
this session. In fact, the orchestra had only been recruited the week before.
Yet it already had a lucrative recording contract with Philips.
This, then, was the maiden flight of the brand-new Hollywood Bowl Orchestra,
whose glowing prospects had been announced at a press conference last fall,
long before a single member, aside from conductor John Mauceri, had been
booked. Forty-five years ago, Hollywood Bowl had had its own resident orchestra
and conductor, Leopold Stokowski’s Hollywood Bowl Symphony. Now with the word
“symphony” dropped for good reason, the great Los Angeles summertime concert
and picnic venue will again be served by its own titular orchestra.
The dropping of “Symphony” from the title is significant. The new orchestra
was formed, recuited from the immense local pool of freelance musicians,
specifically to serve the Bowl for the lighter-weight programming: the weekend
concerts that often come with fireworks and, therefore, draw huge crowds, and
the opening preview week that encompasses the Bowl’s 4th-of-July
celebrations.
For those listeners, and their number is legion, who might have found
intimidation in the notion of the august Los Angeles Philharmonic as the Bowl’s
one resident ensemble, the presence of this second orchestra will suggest a
kinder, gentler concertgoing experience. For the Philharmonic musicians, for
whom playing those weekend-concert pop programs might have represented a kind
of slumming, the new orchestra will send them back to their ivory towers. It
will also, promises Philharmonic general director Ernest Fleischmann, allow the
classical orchestra more time to rehearse its own Tuesday and Thursday
symphonic programs, a consummation many listeners and critics have devoutly
wished lo these many years.
And so there was the latest orchestra in town, under its new conductor, working
up its first recording, a disc to be called “Hollywood Dreams” — not, as
conductor Mauceri pointed out, merely another collection of movie tunes and
other morsels inspired by Hollywood, but a selection as well of “some of the
dreams Hollywood created.” One selection was a genuine curio: a fanfare
created by the formidable 12-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg, during his time
as a Los Angeles resident,for Stokowski’s earlier Hollywood Bowl Symphony: a
pastiche of themes from Schoenberg’s great choral work “Gurre-Lieder.”
Behind thick glass walls, but connected to the control room by microphones and
video cameras, Mauceri and the orchestra swung into a sonorous selection, some
of the music for the forthcoming Albert Brooks film (or Meryl Streep film,
depending on how you look at it) “Defending Your Life,” due out this summer.
Composer Michael Gore, who is also the producer of this disc, beamed approval
from behind an intimidating array of controls.
“This movie starts off in a waiting room of Heaven,” Mauceri called out to
the orchestra by way of cluing them in to the mood. “It’s all very sweet,
about two dead people who meet.” A question came up about the scoring in a
certain passage. “This might work for a moment in the movie,” Mauceri
reasoned with the composer, “but could we change it for the record?” The
composer acquiesced.
“I hate records of bygone movie music,” Mauceri said during a break. “But
this one will be better. The record will be out, next summer, while the movie
is still playing, and so it’ll be much more current.
New York-born and Yale-trained, the 45-year-old Mauceri has had a varied career
that stamps him as ideal for a Hollywood Bowl identification. His actual debut
as a conductor was in 1973 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; in the same year
he made his operatic debut at Washington’s Wolf Trap Festival. On Broadway, he
was on the podium for the Hal Prince reworking of Bernstein’s “Candide” and
also won a Tony for the revival of Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes.”
The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra is the first, however, that Mauceri can call his
own. “”It’s been a long time coming,” he said, his dimples practically
incandescent.
“Conductors don’t have an easy time of it,” he went on. “A violinist can
carry his instrument around; a pianist can always rent one. When I was at Yale,
and desperately needed an orchestra to conduct, I used to cruise the streets,
looking for whoever I could find who was carrying an instrument case. I would
waylay that person; it didn’t matter how good or bad. And now, 25 years later,
all that importuning has paid off.
In Los Angeles, of course, there are more musicians walking the streets
carrying instrument cases. The movie studios and broadcast stations don’t
maintain the house orchestras that they once did, but even with this decline
this remains one of the two American cities where a freelance musician can
carve out a decent living — all other things being equal, of course. (New York
is the other.)
A freelance musician in Los Angeles earns his real money in the studios, doing
the music for commercials and TV dramas, or in a movie orchestra for a big John
Williams epic. If all this commercial work undermines his faith in artistic
standards, he can play in one of the regional symphony orchestras: the
Pasadena, Long Beach or Glendale, or the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
The new Hollywood Bowl orchestra fits into that latter category. In its first
season, which begins with the Bowl this summer, the orchestra will play six
pairs of concerts under its own name; most of its members will play another
pair under the name “Members of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.” Then in
December there will be a tour, two weeks in Japan with a concert scheduled for
Tokyo on New Year’s Eve. And then there’s the Philips contract, which sets the
orchestra above the other regional groups that usually don’t get to
record.
“All that means about $20,000 this first year, which isn’t bad for this amount
of work,” said oboist Joel Timm. “I came out to Los Angeles five years ago. I
had done fairly well in New York, including a year as a temporary player in the
New York Philharmonic. What lured me out here, aside from the obvious pleasures
of life in a warm climate, was an offer to teach half-time at U.S.C.’s music
school. That seemed like a job with high visibility in the music community, and
that translates directly into good freelance jobs.”
Even with that kind of experience and visibility, a freelancer newly arrived in
Los Angeles, or in New York or San Francisco or Chicago, or anyplace with some
amount of freelance activity and high amounts of competition, doesn’t
immediately walk into top-ranking jobs. “I paid my dues,” Timm remembered.
“No matter how good you are, and how nice a guy, the working people in this
town aren’t just going to move over and let you into the group. You start in by
working for what you can get, in smaller gigs or as a substitute. It’s only
now, after six years, that I can feel safe in the inner circle — or close to
it, anyhow.
“And that’s because I’m an oboist, and there aren’t too many of us. If I were
a violinist I might be still be struggling on the edges.”
Another time-out, and freelance keyboard artist and pianist Ralph Grierson
showed off his own fantasic music machine: an array of keyboards (10 or 11 in
all) hooked up to another array of faucets and knobs, all of it hung on three
racks that encompass a space about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth.
Grierson was joking about all that synthesizing equipment someday taking over
from live musicians, something he doesn’t believe for one minute. His jokes
were not finding their mark with the live musician next to him, harpist Katie
Kirkpatrick.
“Los Angeles is a wonderful place,” Grierson said, “with this incredible
aggregation of freelance musicians who can do anything and everything, with no
need for help from electronics and synthesizers. But there’s all this fear of
electronics taking over, which they won’t. If you could translate that fear
energy into practice energy, think how much better, even, we’d all
sound.”
And the fact that someone, namely the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has in these
fear-racked days gone out and started a brand-new orchestra should be, you’d
think, assurance enough that live performance is here to stay.