MEC

Art for the ear, art for the eye: it made for a compelling mixture at the County
Museum on Monday night. In the Bing Theater’s Monday Evening Concert series, an
imaginatively arranged program formed a musical reflection of the “Degenerate
Art” exhibition across the plaza at the Anderson Gallery. By a stroke of
generous planning, the exhibition remained open right up to concert time; the
connections between sight and sound were easily measured.
The effect, however, was not what most of the large audience surely expected.
So overpowering are the elements in the visual display — the paintings, the
film clips, the evocation of life in the arts in a time of horror — that the
concert itself, however well planned and performed, came across inevitably as
an anticlimax.
That fact, in itself, could stand as a tribute to the way Leonard Stein and his
USC colleagues planned the program. The musical elements most repugnant to the
Nazis, after all, were the quiet, sophisticated intellectuality in the works of
Arnold Schoenberg and his colleagues and disciples, the subtle, pointillistic
patterns in Anton Webern, the complexity in Ernst Krenek and in Schoenberg
himself. A program of this music, heard immediately after an immersion in the
explicit fury that leaps off the walls in the exhibition, was bound to sound
shackled.
And so it was, despite some remarkable playing and singing by USC ensembles
under Leonard Stein (in his final act of cultural glory before his retirement
as head of USC’s Arnold Schoenberg Institute), Donald Crockett and Larry
Rachleff. At the start there was Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments in a
crisp, energized reading; at the end came Schoenberg’s “Accompaniment Music
for a Film Scene,” handsomely delivered by the 40-member USC Chamber
Orchestra. You don’t find, under every cabbage leaf, student ensembles capable
of managing this kind of fearsome complexity. USC did itself proud.
In between came a scattering of vocal works: Krenek’s radiant “Durch die
Nacht” repeated from the campus performance of two weeks ago, some of
Alexander von Zemlinsky’s lavender-tinged, world-weary pieces, and rather an
excessive sampling of Hanns Eisler’s simplistic, sing-song settings of poetry
of Bertolt Brecht and Ignazio Silone.
Anne Marie Ketchum and Stephen Kimbrough were the accomplished, stylish
singers; the veteran Stein provided marvelous support as pianist and conductor.
Wise counselor and musician, a bulwark of musical life in this region for
longer than anyone cares to remember, the 74-year-old Stein had come back from
a recent heart attack to perform in a program obviously dear to his heart.