Their Wild Idea Just Might Work : Arts: Two concert pianists hope to bring the sound of music and more to the San Jacinto Mountains with a series of artistic weekend retreats.

Funny thing about beginnings. You never know how they’ll end up.

Take that healthy Los Angeles perennial, the Hollywood Bowl. Early in its history, it twice suffered a series of economic pains--bankruptcy once--and almost died.

Or Wilshire Boulevard’s splendiferous County Museum of Art. In its beginnings and for many years after, it had to share space in Exposition Park with a collection of ancient bones.

Then there’s today’s energetic Center Theatre Group. In its formative days, it was bounced from one performance space to another at UCLA.

Ten years ago, the Museum of Contemporary Art was an ambitious idea whose time was yet to come.

And no one in 1913 would have thought that the barn Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille rented to make the first feature-length silent, “Squaw Man,” would lead to anything.

Now comes husband-wife pianists Ana Lia Lenchantin and Mario Merdirossian. They may not yet be in the same league as all of the above, but then, it’s still early.

The two pianists have an idea. Lots of energy. Talent. And a few connections. They also have an 8,000-square foot former restaurant as their home near the San Jacinto Mountain communities of Idyllwild and Pine Cove.

Next month, they plan to open the 3,000-square-foot living-room portion of their home to the first of a series of monthly retreats--weekend gatherings with experts in music, films and the visual arts.

Lenchantin and Merdirossian have done what a lot of people only think and talk about. They’ve reordered their lives. They’ve put an emphasis on doing creatively what they know best: being creative.

Ten years ago, they left their native Argentina for the United States. Their careers as concert pianists were established. They settled in Woodland Hills, running the Piano Galleria store in Tarzana and thinking it would give them time to teach, to take on recital and concert dates, to enjoy their three musician children. “But the store,” Lenchantin says, “took 30-hour days.”

When their eldest, Ana, a cellist who was then 15, won a scholarship to the Idyllwild School of Music and Arts (ISOMATA) four years ago, they discovered the 40-year-old arts training institute, which had recently added a boarding high school for young artists to its year-around programs.

The scholarship turned out to be a benefit for Ana’s parents, too.

On one weekend trip her parents made to Idyllwild, Ana saw an advertisement for an 8,000-square foot home. Lenchantin and Merdirossian did what most Southern Californians do on weekends.

They took a look.

The house had a history. It was built in 1962 as “Bob Balzer’s Tirol” restaurant. Architect Thornton Ladd was commissioned to design what Balzer calls “one of the most beautiful restaurants in the world.”

Balzer, who writes the wine column in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, recalls the heady days of the restaurant when Dwight Eisenhower, Marlon Brando, Joan Fontaine, Donald Douglas and other celebrated folks were frequent diners, driving up from Palm Springs or Los Angeles. Carpets were imported from Japan. The booths were of apricot leather. Three walls of the dining area were of glass. The restaurant won honors from Holiday magazine. And it boasted a rare item for the Idyllwild area: a liquor-serving bar.

But on New Year’s Eve, 1965, the Tirol closed. “Unsolvable problems,” Balzer recalls. Disputes, high fire insurance rates, increased costs. “I was doing land-office business,” Balzer says, “but I lost $500,000.”

For several years, the restaurant remained empty, repossessed by a savings and loan. Eventually, it was bought as a home. Then in mid-1989, the two pianists from Woodland Hills took possession. They enlisted Idyllwild architect Robert Prefer to “build a house inside of a house” while they began to think of ways in which this house near Lily Rock and Strawberry Creek could be shared with others.

That’s where that 3,000-foot, three-story-high living room was put into play. They offered their home to ISOMATA for a fund-raising concert and found the room worked well for a musical event. Then ISOMATA juniors and seniors put it to a test at their annual prom.

Why not other gatherings, recitals? With their friend Noemi Pollack of Los Angeles, Lenchantin and Merdirossian started planning what they now call “Weekends with the Masters.”

Bob Balzer’s Tirol became Tyrol House, Idyllwild, on certain weekends an Alpine salon. They would invite guest artists for Saturday afternoon and evening talks and performances. Sunday afternoons would become master classes conducted by the guest artists.

The first of the series is scheduled for March 23-24. Writer Vicki King will hold a weekend session called “From Blank Page to Completed Script,” aimed at television and motion-picture script writing. One-day sessions will cost $100. The weekend package is $250.

Later on, the couple has scheduled:

* Lalo Schifrin, pianist and composer, who will discuss jazz and perform with a combo.

* Daniel Pollack, pianist, who will explore the Romantic era in music.

* Rosalyn Tureck, pianist and harpsichordist, who will talk about and perform the music of Bach.

* Angel Romero, virtuoso Spanish guitarist, who will lead sessions on the classical guitar.

* Leigh Wiener, photographer, who will talk about the camera as a medium of visual art.

The talks and master classes will be held at Tyrol House. (For more information, call: (714) 659-2686.) Lenchantin and Merdirossian have arranged cabins for overnight guests at That Very Special Place motel. They are ready to handle 100 visitors. “Even 30 or 40 would be OK,” Merdirossian says. This is, after all, all new and unpredictable.

But the two musicians think their timing is right. ISOMATA attracts 30,000 visitors a year to its various arts programs. More and more visitors from Palm Springs have been going up the mountain to explore the region. There’s a whole new population sweep across the Moreno Valley below.

There are also more people on the mountainside like Lenchantin and Merdirossian, people seeking changes in that brilliantly clear, brilliantly thin air 6,000 feet up