SZERYNG’S ORANGE COUNTY DEBUT

Henryk Szeryng, a Polish-born citizen of Mexico, has been acclaimed as musician and violinist on several continents, has appeared regularly with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1958 and given recitals in Southern California with some frequency.

But never in Orange County. Until tonight, that is. In the new Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, Szeryng will play Brahms’ Violin Concerto with the Orange County Pacific Symphony, Keith Clark conducting.

Between the gala opening of the new hall on Monday night and Szeryng’s first rehearsal with the Pacific orchestra the next evening, the veteran musician talked expansively.

Though he turned 68 just a week ago, Szeryng says, “There is no slowing down. On the contrary, I am more busy than ever.”

That is a choice the violinist has made. He claims to have no great desire “for a vacation of only rest, or doing nothing. The true vacation is to do something other than one’s regular routine.

“For me, to go off to my home in Mexico for eight or ten days, several times a year, is vacation enough.”

Szeryng’s 1986-87 began last week, with four performances with the Detroit Symphony, Gunther Herbig conducting, of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The final one took place Sunday; Monday, Szeryng and his wife flew to California, and Monday night, he attended the gala opening of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The next day, he had nothing but “admiration for the people who made this happen, who raised the money, who gave so generously. They have created something that will remain.”

He also said he was “tremendously impressed with the way this opening became not only an inauguration of the building, but a consecration of its use,” through the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta.

As always, Szeryng maintains a complicated but single-minded schedule of musical activities.

--He continues to tour the world as violin soloist, sometimes for months at a time.

--He gives master classes for young violinists, at least twice a year in Mexico--his principal home, where he has restored a 250-year-old house “beyond its original size and beauty, but in the original style”--several times in Paris and Geneva, periodically in Siena (Italy) and Indiana.

--He serves as an official ambassador and diplomat for Mexico, the country of which he has been a citizen since 1946.

About the Brahms Concerto, vehicle of his debut, at the age of 14 1/2, in Warsaw in 1933, Szeryng says: “If my performances have any freshness and spontaneity in them, after I have played the work all these many years, it is no miracle. It is only hard work.

“What keeps the great masterworks of Beethoven and Brahms and Bach new in appeal is, I believe, the time one spends away from these works, time given over to working, learning, studying and performing the 20 and more contemporary pieces I keep in my repertoire.

“It’s very simple. Discipline and hard work are what do it, that and an insistence on not making it easy on ourselves. One has to maintain technique, of course, but one also has to maintain integrity of head, spirit and heart.”