New Director, Chamber Music Society in Tune

The shoe finally dropped last week when the La Jolla Chamber Music Society announced its new executive director, cellist Neale Perl of Washington. The 32-year-old go-getter has worn a number of hats on the Washington musical scene, from performer to organizer to impresario. Because he has many responsibilities to transfer before he can leave the Capital, the articulate musician does not expect to move to La Jolla before early December.

With pianist Margaret Otwell, Perl was a co-founder of the Washington Chamber Society. Now in its eighth season, the organization’s conservative chamber music programming looks very much like the meat and potatoes fare the La Jolla society has favored, especially in its Sherwood Auditorium series.

“I like traditional music,” Perl explained in a phone conversation from his Maryland home. “I can’t pretend to like music that does not appeal to me,” he said, referring to a broad category of contemporary music. He pointed out that his sort of programming brought in the audiences--his society has presented concerts in the Washington French Embassy and at a University of Maryland theater. Perl added that he and the La Jolla board members saw eye to eye when it came to musical tastes.

“I had a chance to speak to each of them individually while I was here,” Perl said. In addition to conferring with music society officials, he spent his time in the San Diego area house hunting and attending last month’s Symphony Hall performance by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, part of the society’s downtown Celebrity Series.

Besides helping find new leadership for his Washington Chamber Society, Perl said he needs to line up a replacement for the January cello recital he is scheduled to play as the Washington society’s fourth and final offering of the current season. Perl acknowledged that he will probably put his cello playing on the back burner after he assumes his La Jolla administrative post.

“I’m ready to put the cello down,” he said. “I may be able to play my scales every day, but that will have to be it for a while. When my friend Gary Hoffman comes back to La Jolla for summer festivals with his Amati (cello), I’ll be just as happy to keep my instrument locked up in its case.”

As part of Perl’s accommodation to the new post, the La Jolla folks are sending him off to a week of computer schooling. Not only will this prepare him for the society’s high-tech, computerized operations, it give him another skill that will occupy the Perl fingers and keep them from his cello.

Most people called Harry Partch an eccentric or a weird experimentalist, but few denied the unique genius of the California composer who spent his sunset days in San Diego. Like Charles Ives, he was an American primitive composer, owing little to the refined traditions of European art music.

Since Partch’s demise in 1974, the collection of specialized instruments he designed--which are necessary for the performance of the Partch canon--has been housed at San Diego State University. In the years since 1974, SDSU music professor Danlee Mitchell, curator of the Partch collection and anointed keeper of his musical tradition, has directed a number of Partch’s musical theater pieces.

Last fall in Philadelphia, Mitchell presided over a new production of Partch’s “Revelations in the Courthouse Park,” which has been described as a radio adaptation of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” set in a small Midwest town in the 1950s. This production by Philadelphia’s American Music Theater Festival will be broadcast locally at 2 p.m. Nov. 13 on public radio station KPBS (FM 89.5).

Mitchell explained that the work had been done only once before, in 1961, while Partch was a composer in residence at the University of Illinois. That production, however, was by students. This Philadelphia production marked the first professional mounting of the work.

Although Partch is generally treated as an unimportant footnote to local history, Mitchell was impressed at the high level of Partch stock on the East Coast.

“Partch’s name is a big attraction in most places in the Western world--especially when you get farther away from San Diego. Because I was directing the production, I was a minor celebrity there. Even John Rockwell of the New York Times interviewed me and did a piece on ‘Revelations.’ ”

Mitchell spent three months teaching Philadelphia musicians to play the Partch instruments, which include tuned glass cloud chamber bowls, as well as a host of exotic percussion and stringed instruments. Some of the Partch instruments are tuned in microtones--43 divisions of the standard 12-note octave. To assist him in the project, Mitchell took with him three local Partch specialists, including San Diego Symphony percussionist Jonathan Szanto.

“Partch believed in integrated theater,” explained Mitchell. “He was a student of ancient Greek culture, and he understood the use of ritual in drama. This work centers on the ritual aspects of American popular music culture. The main character is Dion, an Elvis surrogate who visits the Midwest town.”

According to Mitchell, the character of Dion was also intended to represent Dionysus of Greek mythology. He recalls that Partch was quite surprised when he informed the composer that Dion was also the name of a popular music star during the late 1950s, the time when Partch was completing his composition.

Sunday’s radio broadcast of “Revelations” will be paired with a short documentary feature hosted by Eric Solzman, a friend of Partch. This feature includes interviews with Partch and colleagues who knew him, as well as shorter examples of other Partch compositions.