USC GROUP EXPORTING ‘MUSIC FROM EXILE’

“There are a number of ironies in sending a student ensemble from USC to West Berlin to play music by composers who left Germany and came to California,” says Leonard Stein, director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute and one of three conductors traveling with the USC Contemporary Music Ensemble on its September trip to the divided city. The group is participating in the yearlong festivities celebrating the 750th anniversary of the City of Berlin.

Those ironies include the fact that the exiled composers--Hanns Eisler, Ernst Toch, Ernst Krenek and Arnold Schoenberg--all were successful in Berlin before leaving Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, Stein elucidates.

Another irony is that “our young performers today, the 12 members of the Contemporary Music Ensemble, are so removed--40 years removed, after all--from the circumstances that brought these musicians to this country, that they have to be reminded where the composers came from.” Eisler spent only five years in this country, Stein points out, but Toch, Krenek and Schoenberg, over the decades, have become California-associated music makers.

This concert, part of the series “Music From Exile,” will be performed by the USC ensemble at the Jewish Community Center in West Berlin on Sept. 6. Works to be performed include Eisler’s “Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain,” Toch’s “There is a Season to Everything . . .,” Krenek’s “Flute Piece in Nine Phases,” and Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.”

(To this agenda has been added a chamber work by the American John Harbison, currently composer in residence at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Harbison work is “Samuel Chapter,” a setting for soprano, flute, clarinet, viola, cello, piano and percussion of a biblical verse, written for the Boston new music group Collage, and first performed by that ensemble in 1978.)

“In a sense, having accepted these composers in our city and reaping the benefits of their presence here,” Stein says, “we can now reciprocate with our sister city, West Berlin, and send back this gift of music.” Eisler’s “Fourteen Ways,” was written on the East Coast before Eisler came to Los Angeles in 1942; the Toch, Krenek and Schoenberg pieces were written in Los Angeles, Stein points out.

The program to be heard in Berlin will be previewed here in a free concert at the Schoenberg Institute on Sept. 1 at 8 p.m. Traveling with the 12 players will be Larry J. Livingston, dean of the school of music at USC; Stein; Donald Crockett, director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble, and Heidi Lesemann, manager of the ensemble.

BACK TO THE BOWL: The seventh week of this 66th Hollywood Bowl season sees the return to Cahuenga Pass of Andre Previn, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and co-director this summer of the Philharmonic Institute, the training academy for young conductors and orchestral players. Previn will be on hand at the final Institute concert of the year, tonight at 7:30 in the Bowl, appearing as co-soloist (with Institute co-director Lukas Foss) in Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and as conductor in Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony.

Tuesday night, Previn conducts the Philharmonic itself in Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony. Before intermission at that event, he leads two concertos: The one in E-flat for four trumpets by Vivaldi--with Philharmonic members Thomas Stevens, Rob Roy McGregor, Donald Green and Boyde Hoode as soloists--and the one in B minor for cello, by Antonin Dvorak, with Lynn Harrell the soloist.

Thursday, Previn returns, with pianist Krystian Zimerman, for a program encompassing Prokofiev’s “Lt. Kije” Suite, the E-flat Piano Concerto by Liszt and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony.

A concert honoring the memory of the late Michael Moores--the British pianist and conductor whose musical life flourished in this country beginning in 1976, and who died in a car accident July 24--will be given next Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Community Church in Bear Valley Springs, near Tehachapi. In the United States, Moores was active as a teacher, first at Cal State L.A., later at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Houston. Moores also worked in films and television, in recent years often as a collaborator with Patrick Williams. Moore’s family has announced the establishment of a scholarship fund for young musicians in his name.