Composers on Parade

Twentieth-Century piano music specialist Andrzej Dutkiewicz appears Saturday at 8 p.m. at USC’s Arnold Schoenberg Institute to play music by himself, Tomasz Sikorski, Zbigniew Baginski, Boguslaw Schaeffer, Marian Borkowski and Renata Kunkel.

Dutkiewicz (pronounced, approximately, doot-KAY-vitch), a pianist trained in his native Poland and at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., will play his own “Six Meditations” (1979) for piano and tape, “Three Sketches in Retrospect” (1985) and Suite (1970). At Eastman, where he took a doctorate, Dutkiewicz was a student of the late Eugene List.

According to Wanda Wilk, co-founder of the Polish Music Reference Center at USC, the 46-year-old Dutkiewicz now teaches winters at the Music Academy in Warsaw and summers at the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Mich.

Sikorski (born in 1939), at one time a student of Nadia Boulanger, is, like Dutkiewicz, a composer/pianist who specializes in playing music of his contemporaries. Schaeffer (born 1929) is simultaneously a theoretician, avant-gardist and prize-winning composer. Baginski, Borkowski and Kunkel, Wilk says, are from the youngest generation of Polish composers.

BRITTEN: Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” launches the two-production, winter-spring season by Los Angeles Music Center Opera at the Wiltern Theatre, Tuesday night at 7. Staged by Gordon Davidson and conducted by Robert Duerr (see story on Page 51), the 1960 opera, which follows Shakespeare’s play very closely, is here cast largely by members of the resident company of Music Center Opera.

That cast includes Virginia Sublett (Tytania), Jeffrey Gall (Oberon), Angelique Burzinski (Helena), Alice Baker (Hermia), Jonathan Mack (Lysander), Rodney Gilfry (Demetrius), Michael Gallup (Bottom), Peter Derick (Theseus), Stephanie Vlahos (Hippolyta), Heinz Blankenburg (Quince), Stephen Plummer (Snout), John Atkins (Starveling) and John Allee (Puck). Subsequent performances are scheduled Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and next Sunday at 2 p.m.

PLUS HAYDN: Also a part of the UK/LA festivities, the Los Angeles Philharmonic subscription concerts this week offer a most unhackneyed Haydn/Britten program. With soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom as soloist, music director Andre Previn will lead this agenda: Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 (“London”); the same composer’s dramatic concert aria, “Scena di Berenice,” and Britten’s “Our Hunting Fathers” for soprano and orchestra and Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes.”

“Our Hunting Fathers” was written in 1936 in collaboration with the poet W. H. Auden and is said to contain references to political events of that year. Three performances of this program are scheduled in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center: Thursday and Friday nights at 8 and next Sunday afternoon at 2:30. During this month, Soederstrom will also appear in recital, with Previn at the piano, Feb. 24 in the Pavilion.