YOUNG MUSIC ENSEMBLE TO HELP EAST MEET WEST

Three summers ago, Orange County Youth Symphony Orchestra members made the kind of trip expected of an American ensemble raised on the glories of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms.

That concert tour, the first taken by the orchestra outside the United States, took these high school and college musicians to the cultural citadels of Europe, from Salzburg to Venice.

This summer’s three-week journey to the Orient, however, has extra significance.

In the Orange County ensemble’s first overseas tour since the European journey, the tour repertoire will again consist of the works of such European titans as Beethoven and Mozart and such renowned Americans as Aaron Copland.

But this time the students will be performing this kind of music in China--a communist society that until recent years had banned Western classical music as capitalistically decadent and bourgeois.

In fact, the tour that will begin Saturday in Peking for the 50-student Orange County ensemble is considered one of the first by an American youth orchestra since China began to woo Western performing groups.

“The Chinese are now welcoming people like us with open arms. They’re eager to hear Beethoven and the like again, and to hear people like us perform,” explained John Koshak, the Orange County Youth Symphony Orchestra’s music director, who will be leading a tour that also includes performances in Hong Kong and Japan.

Tonight, Koshak will lead the 50-member traveling group in a “tour preview concert”--complete with a folk-styled work by a Chinese composer--at 8 p.m. in Chapman College’s Memorial Hall Auditorium in Orange. (Tickets are $4 for general admission, $2 for students and senior citizens. Call (714) 997-6871 for information.)

This preview concert caps a marathon day-and-evening round of rehearsals that began Sunday to hone the tour repertoire, which also includes works by Bartok, Bizet and the American composers Henry Cowell and Norman Dello Joio.

Then Friday, the tour group, including 16 adults, will depart from Los Angeles for Peking on a People’s Republic of China jumbo jet.

At one time, such a visit to Communist-ruled China by an established Orange County organization would have been hard to believe.

Throughout the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, China was undergoing a socio-political upheaval that resulted in massive purges--including those affecting Western-influenced artists and musicians--and in an official repugnance to Western culture.

At the time, many organizations in Orange County typified a widespread attitude in the United States: Any formal visit to a communist country, especially a hostile one like China, would be unthinkable.

But political tensions eased after President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, followed by trips there by leading sports and cultural groups, including the landmark tours in the 1970s by the Philadelphia and Boston orchestras and the current visit by tenor Luciano Pavarotti.

And since 1979, when U.S. recognition was extended to the Peking government, China has sent some of its major arts groups to this country, including the Peking Opera Theatre and the Central Ballet of Peking, and some minor groups such as the Chongqing acrobatic troupe now performing at Magic Mountain amusement park.

Still, the exchanges have been comparatively few, so that the Orange County Youth Symphony visit is something of a milestone.

According to Koshak, who is also chairman of Chapman College’s music department, his ensemble’s trip is the first invited visit by a performing arts organization from Orange County.

And Paul Koutny--whose Educational Travel Inc. agency in Allentown, Pa., and Cologne arranged the ensemble’s visit--said tours by American community orchestral and choral groups are still rare in China.

This is still true of contingents from California, he said. Three years ago, Koutny arranged a tour by the William Hall Chorale, the Southern California group led by Hall, another Chapman College professor. Last summer, community chorales from Los Angeles, San Mateo and Santa Rosa appeared at an American music festival that Koutny helped to set up at the Shanghai Conservatory.

Koshak and Koutny--who will also be going with the Orange County students--said Chinese approval of the youth orchestra tour was relatively easy, thanks to Koutny’s previous tour connections there and China’s accelerated solicitation of American cultural troupes.

Also, thanks to information sent by Koutny, the Chinese were familiar with the critical success of the Orange County ensemble’s 1983 European trip to Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, and the orchestra’s national recognition in the United States.

(Founded in 1970, the full orchestra numbers 90 members. It is sponsored by Las Campanas of Orange County, the Orange County Department of Education and Chapman College. The orchestra ended its nine-concert regular 1985-86 season April 20.)

In 1984, the Shanghai Conservatory invited the Orange County ensemble to take part in the second annual American music festival to be held this summer in Shanghai. Like the first festival, the idea was to expose the Chinese to American and other Western classical music as performed by representative U.S. community groups.

Koshak said the program was settled without much fuss. Beside such works as Beethoven’s “Prometheus” overture, Mozart’s Concerto in B-flat for Bassoon and Dello Joio’s “New York Profiles,” the ensemble will also perform “Dance of the Yao People,” the folk-styled work by China’s Liu Mau.

Explained Koutny: “The Chinese asked only one thing of us, that we don’t play anything that’s religious or that’s rock music. These kinds (of Western music) are still out.”

The Orange County group’s opening concert Monday will be at Peking’s Haidian Theatre (the concert will be sandwiched between tourist treks to the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Peking Opera Theatre and a Peking duck restaurant).

In Shanghai later in the week, however, the Orange County ensemble will be the only U.S. troupe performing at the American music festival there. Two other U.S. groups--community choirs from Napa Valley and from Anchorage--had to drop out, due to problems in raising funds to make the trip.

Nevertheless, the Orange County ensemble is expected to perform to full houses. “They tell us we will be one of the first American youth orchestras to play the city’s main concert hall. Originally, we were supposed to play only one evening in the smaller hall (at the conservatory). Then they wrote us that concert was sold out and they were moving us to the bigger (1,500-seat) hall and adding a second concert,” Koshak said.

While in Shanghai, the Orange County student musicians--ranging in ages from 13 to 23--will have formal sessions with Chinese conservatory students to discuss American and other Western music trends.

In addition to Koshak’s formal lectures, he and the other teachers in the Orange County group--including assistant conductors Cameron Malotte and Robert Frelly and bassoon soloist John Campbell--will have workshops with Shanghai Conservatory faculty.

After a tourist visit to Suzhou on July 4, they will travel to Hong Kong for a concert in the Sheung Chui Civic Center. In Japan, they will give concerts in Tokyo, Sagamahara and Shizuoka, and will perform with local orchestras in the two smaller cities.

While in Sagamahara, they will be living with local families for the first time. (The stays in China and Hong Kong will be at large new hotels.) After a tourist visit to Kyoto, they will leave July 17 for Los Angeles.

As in the case of the 1983 European trip, part of the travel costs for students is being paid for with funds raised by the Orange County Youth Symphony Orchestra’s 500-member support organization. (The supporters raised enough to reduce by $650 the per-student cost of $3,548.)

Fifteen of the 50 students have special ties on the trip--they are of either Chinese or Japanese ancestry. Most of them were born in the United States, including several of Chinese descent whose parents had lived in Taiwan.

Only three of the Chinese-American students have been to mainland China: Viola players Ken and Kim Chan, whose grandparents live in Hong Kong, and flutist Nye Liu, who lived one year in Peking when his China-born father was teaching at a university there.

Liu and the Chans will be revisiting relatives during the tour, and viola player Christine Seki, a fourth-generation Japanese-American, will be visiting relatives in Tokyo.

The other students, however, have no such ethnic ties to ease what they say will be a huge cultural shock, especially in China.

“Our cultures are so different, and I realize we have a lot of stereotypes of Asian people, like most Americans have,” said violinist Christina King. “But I’m hoping that music will provide us with a special tie, a kind of cultural friendship.”

Violinist Eric Shiflett, who made the 1983 trip to Europe, said: “I have no real idea what to expect. I just know it will be overwhelming, far more so than the tour to Europe.”

Then he added: “I know one thing. We all want a real interchange. We hope to learn as much from them as they can from us.”