Mixing Novelties With Bread and Butter

Now about to begin its sixth summer season, Yehuda Gilad’s Malibu-based Strawberry Creek Festival continues to grow. But, says Gilad, “not too fast.”

The festival is a training school as well as a series of summer concerts given by a prestigious faculty and students, and Gilad sees its ideal growth as “steady but careful.”

In 1989, this basically chamber-music festival--small ensembles perform much of its repertory, and the Strawberry Creek orchestra at its biggest numbers only 60 players--has increased its span to three weeks (from two) and its public concerts to seven (from six). Gilad figures the budget at $110,000.

“Musically, we like to mix the unusual with the standard. This year we are offering a lot of standard repertory,” he says, mentioning well-known works by Mozart, Brahms and Mendelssohn on his upcoming programs. “As a school, we feel it’s our duty to offer our students not only novelties to perform, but the bread-and-butter pieces, too.”

Still, the novelties appear. The festival-opening program Wednesday, for instance, to be given not at Pepperdine University, Malibu, but down at USC, in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute (ASI), offers a rarely heard Schoenberg fragment, “Ein Stelldichein,” Hindemith’s Quartet (1938) and Charles Loeffler’s Trio for viola, piano and oboe.

Gilad had been told the Schoenberg piece would be a West Coast premiere, but recently, the directors of the ASI discovered it had been performed there by the Netherlands-based Schoenberg Ensemble in the early 1980s.

“Stelldichein” means rendezvous , and the work, “written in the era of ‘Verklarte Nacht’ and ‘Gurrelieder,’ ” Gilad explains, was inspired by the composer’s favorite poet at that time, Richard Dehmel.

Beginning the season downtown is no ploy or marketing strategy, says festival director Gilad.

“Our audience, which until recently was more a Westside than a Malibu audience, will be willing, I think, to travel to USC. And, besides the Schoenberg connection, we like the intimacy of the Institute.”

Smothers Theatre in Malibu, a 400-seat auditorium where, says Gilad, his audiences up to now have averaged 300 listeners, is actually only a little less intimate.

“But that’s the way we like it,” he says.

The quintet of instrumentalists, under the name Strawberry Creek Chamber Players at the opening represents not only Gilad’s festival faculty, but at least four generations of musicians, as well: violinist Eudice Shapiro, clarinetist Mitchell Lurie, cellist Peter Rejto, pianist Val Underwood and violist Karen Ritscher.

Lurie can also be heard on the Aug. 11 chamber concert, in Carl Nielsen’s “Serenata in Vano,” a piece Gilad calls “melancholic.”

The second concert event program of the festival, next Sunday at 7:30 p.m., is an orchestral program including Barber’s “School for Scandal” Overture, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola (with Shapiro and Ritscher the soloists) and Brahms’ Serenade No. 1. Subsequent orchestra concerts are scheduled Aug. 3, 5 and 12, with performances by the Chamber Players taking place Aug. 4 and 11.

ON TOUR: New York City Ballet returns to Europe for a four-week tour, Aug. 29-Sept. 24. The American company from Lincoln Center will dance in four cities: Copenhagen, Glasgow, The Hague and Paris. It will carry a repertory of 19 ballets. . . . Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony, the young, Florida-based orchestra which visited Southern California in the last year, embarks on its first international tour this summer. Last week, the orchestra, made up of musicians whose ages range from 21 to 30, played at the new Opera Bastille on Wednesday. It will give performances, under Tilson Thomas and with piano soloist Vladimir Feltsman, Aug. 4-6 in Buenos Aires; in Montevideo, Uruguay, Aug. 8, and in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Aug. 10. Immediately upon its return to this country, the orchestra will play at Wolf Trap Farm in Virginia, Aug. 13. . . . American Ballet Theatre begins its 50th anniversary season Aug. 22, with performances in Tokyo. Subsequent cities on ABT’s Japanese tour are Osaka, Nagoya and Yokohama. The dance company returns to this country, Sept. 11. Philip Morris Companies Inc. is the sponsor of ABT’s 50th Anniversary Celebration and national tour . . . Conductor Zdenek Macal will lead the Milwaukee Symphony on its 30th anniversary East Coast tour, Oct. 2-8. Macal, who also holds leadership posts with the San Antonio and Grant Park Symphonies, has been a regular visitor to the Pacific Symphony in Orange County.

REMEMBERING: A concert to be held in Teatr Wiekli, the opera house of Warsaw, Poland, Sept. 1, will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Poland by the Nazis in 1939. Participating in this concert will be composers/conductors Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss and Krzysztof Penderecki; singers Barbara Hendricks and Hermann Prey; violinist Kaja Czowszka and pianist Krystian Zimerman, among others. Interspersed among the musical works (by the three conductors, and by Schoenberg, Beethoven and Szymanowski) will be a number of personal reminiscences written and narrated by Samuel Pisar, one of the youngest survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp.