CLASSICAL MUSIC / KENNETH HERMAN : Chamber Society Gets Jump on Soviet Music Offerings

The La Jolla Chamber Music Society will get a jump on the Soviet Arts Festival on Friday by presenting the Moscow Virtuosi two weeks before the mayor’s arts party begins. Performing at the Civic Theatre, the acclaimed chamber orchestra’s 30 musicians will endeavor to repeat the favorable impression they made here two years ago on their first American tour.

The La Jolla chamber sponsored the Moscow Virtuosi’s 1987 visit and was sufficiently impressed to ask the group back to open the society’s 1989-90 International Orchestra series, extending the offer a year before the festival was announced. In March, the series will bring the Orchestre National de France under Lorin Maazel and, in June, will present the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Under the leadership of concertmaster Vladimir Spivakov, Moscow Virtuosi’s founder and director, the ensemble will play a varied program of J. S. Bach, Rossini, Vivaldi and a single Russian offering, Shostakovich’s C Minor Chamber Symphony, which is actually a transcription for string orchestra of the composer’s brilliant String Quartet No. 8. With violinist Arkady Futer, Spivakov will solo in Bach’s D Minor Concerto for Two Violins, BWV 1043.

The Moscow Virtuosi started its five-week American tour Sunday in St. Paul, (Minn., and will perform tonight in Costa Mesa and Wednesday in Pasadena. Unlike many touring orchestras, the Moscow musicians do not take just one or two programs on the road. They have about 20 works in this season’s touring repertory, which means that, of the dozen pieces they will perform in Southern California, only three will be played more than once.

Multimedia allegory. Janos Negesy is UC San Diego’s violinist for all seasons. His appetite spans John Cage’s recent 80-minute “Freeman” Etudes and obscure concertos by Ernst Krenek to the standard chamber music morsels he turns out in his “Soiree for Music Lovers” series. This Friday at UCSD’s Center for Music Experiment, Negesy will unveil “Aura,” a work for electronic violin, computer and kinetic sculpture.

Fred Thiem’s 7-foot metal sculpture, “Sisyphus,” will interact with the electronic violin and computer program to create a sonic montage titled “Aura.” Alluding to its namesake myth, Thiem’s sculpture is a wire-frame globe with a small motorized cart that slowly ascends its side, only to roll back to its original position.

“The sculpture makes pings and crackles when it moves,” explained computer operator Lee Ray, “and has a contact mike on it that picks up the sounds, which are then sustained and processed by the violin.”

Processing, altering and mixing sounds is composer Ray’s forte, especially as he plays Boswell to Negesy’s Johnson. According to Ray, although the work has a core identity and certain recognized contours, it will never be the same twice because of the interaction of the components.

“Janos never knows exactly what I am going to do at the computer,” Ray said.

Not just French horn. When Murry Sidlin, popular guest conductor with the San Diego Symphony, last breezed into town, he had some compliments for the orchestra’s assistant principal horn player, Ethan Dulsky. The kudos, however, were not for Dulsky’s slick brass licks, but for his conducting prowess at this summer’s Aspen Music Festival. Sidlin is one of the festival’s regular conducting coaches, and Dulsky was one of the aspiring conducting candidates.

“A few people seemed to be quite promising, including Dulsky, who was expressive and serious on the podium,” Sidlin said. He lamented the music industry’s infatuation with young, hot-shot conductors.

“We live in a world where, if you haven’t conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra at age 26, you’re not taken seriously. It used to be that you didn’t hear a conductor before the age of 50, when the conductor had thoroughly digested all the elements of his craft.”

Truth in advertising. Lynn Schuette, executive director of downtown’s Sushi Performance Gallery, deserves a special award for rising above the hype and self-congratulatory promotion that seems endemic to arts directors. In her introductory program note to Sushi’s 10th season, Schuette wrote with unusual candor, “As we all know, art can be transcendent or cloying, riveting or trivial, profound or boring. All has been presented at Sushi in the attempt to give artists a voice.”