American Pianist Waves the Flag for Bernstein Symphony

For a long time, says James Tocco, “pianists didn’t want to touch” Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, a work that is actually a piano concerto, and is subtitled, after the words of W. H. Auden, “The Age of Anxiety.”

Tocco, the Detroit-born pianist who plays “The Age of Anxiety” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Hollywood Bowl Thursday night, claims the days of that work’s neglect are over.

The 44-year-old American musician has “played it 12 to 15 times in the past few seasons. This year I take it to Chicago. Later this season, Detroit. It’s coming into its own as a repertory piece.

“Perhaps the work has finally emerged from that stage when the Bernstein/Foss recording sort of dominated any thinking about it.”

Then, too, Tocco points out, “It was always a little bit embarrassing to some artists to have to sit still for the last few minutes (of the work). Now, with the revised version, made about 10 years ago, the finale is at last quite satisfying for the soloist.”

Maybe, too, enough time has elapsed since the work’s beginnings, in the late 1940s, to put the characteristically American piece in perspective.

Tocco, among whose mentors have been the late Magda Tagliaferro and the octogenarian Claudio Arrau, has up to now eschewed any sort of repertory specialization, he emphasizes in a phone interview from La Jolla, where he has been vacationing.

He says he certainly cherishes the French heritage he gleaned from Tagliaferro and the German training he took from Arrau, without making either of those repertories his exclusive territory.

“But in all the years I lived in Europe, I tried to be very perspicacious about playing American music abroad. And I’m proud of my association with American composers--not so much the international ones, but rather the identifiably American ones, the writers of, shall we say, more ethnicity: Bernstein, Copland, Corigliano, Barber, Foss.”

In this year of Bernstein’s 70th birthday and Aaron Copland’s 90th, Tocco says, he has concocted a Copland/Bernstein recital program, as well as a Bernstein/Copland record album.

As far as Bernstein is concerned, Tocco says, “I am very proud to be associated with this composer, who is without a doubt the major figure of his generation.

“He is, in a sense, my musical godfather, since I and so many others have been influenced by everything he has done. The writing for Broadway, the revival of Mahler, the young people’s concerts--all influences I grew up with. In fact, Bernstein was--when I was a youngster in Detroit--the first conductor I tried to visit backstage.”

Today, Tocco is one who does the influencing. For the past 11 years he has been on the faculty of the school of music at Indiana University in Bloomington.

One wonders how the current generation of college-age pianists differs from previous ones. Tocco answers without hesitation.

“They play better.”

Not that their quality makes their career-building any easier.

“The system under which this generation will make careers is still a flawed one. I have two superior students--both from Romania, by a coincidence--one going off to New York this year, the other still an undergraduate. I’m talking about major pianistic talents, young people with the musical resources to go the distance. But the only way open to them is the international competition system--and that’s such a terrible, degrading path. I worry about them. But there’s nothing I can do to make it easier for them.”