Arts Patrons May Sample 3 Musical Firsts : Entertainment: A Robert Cummings oboe concerto and Zelman Bokser’s ‘Points of Light’ orchestral work will be premiered. Also due: a tandem performance by Shakespearean actors and the Garden Grove Symphony.

This will be a weekend of musical firsts in Orange County.

Micah Levy and the Orange County Chamber Orchestra will give the first performances of local composer Robert Cummings’ Concerto for Oboe and Strings on Sunday at St. Joseph Center in Orange and Monday at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

UC Irvine faculty member Zelman Bokser will conduct the UC Irvine Symphony in the premiere of his orchestral work “Points of Light” tonight and Saturday at UCI’s Fine Arts Village Theatre.

And the Garden Grove Symphony and members of the Grove Shakespeare Festival will team up for the first time to offer a program of Shakespearean drama and music Saturday at the Don Wash Auditorium in Garden Grove.

Robert Cummings said he got the idea to write a concerto for oboe while listening to the radio as he was driving along in his car in 1987.

“I heard the Corigliano Oboe Concerto and was rather drawn to it,” he said on the phone from his home in Garden Grove. “I thought it would be a nice thing to write. There are not that many in the literature . . . so I proceeded to write one in the next three months.”

An organist and music director of Holy Family Cathedral in Orange for almost 25 years, Cummings, 50, has been composing since he was 14. His Third Symphony, he said, won a Hollywood Bowl Award in 1956, but “nothing ever came of it.”

“It is discouraging, but it’s very hard for a composer to be an advocate of himself,” he observed.

Cummings said he underwent an “artistic crisis” in 1970 after “10 years of experimentation in avant-garde material. I, like all artists, started in a tonal style and, through the education process at various schools, was forced to write in a rather different style. I looked back on (his work) and asked, is this what I really want to do? So about 1981, I went back to a semi-tonal style, post-Britten, post-Tippett. . . .

“That is the dilemma of the modern artist--what in the world style does one write in?”

He calls his Oboe Concerto “unabashedly tonal,” so much so that “I’m sure there are going to be people thinking, ‘What’s this guy doing in the 20th Century?’ ”

“But it’s definitely a 20th-Century work. The harmony is 20th Century. But the structure is very classical. The first movement is sonata allegro, the second is rather an interlude and the third is a sonata rondo.

“Lots of composers are coming back to tonality,” he continued. “In my music from this point on, I will try to meet the audience at least half-way. If that’s a sell-out, I don’t know.”

Micah Levy will conduct the premiere of Robert Cummings’ Concerto for Oboe and Strings with soloist Allan Vogel Sunday at 4 p.m. at St. Joseph Center, Loyola Marymount University, 480 S. Batavia St. in Orange; and Monda y at 8 p.m. at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Levy also will conduct Haydn’s Symphony No. 82 and William Boyce’s Overture No. 4. Tickets: $14-$17. Information: (714) 538-8391.

Zelman Bokser swears that his new “Points of Light” has “nothing to do with George Bush.

“I was in Europe when the campaign was going on and for some reason managed not to have heard about that phrase,” Bokser said in a recent phone interview.

“I had planned this piece knowing I’d be doing Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, a very dark, heavy kind of work, on the same concert. So my original idea was to write something considerably more ethereal, in texture anyway.”

The composer said the work lasts about 11 minutes and is written for a “large orchestra, used sparingly.”

“There are particular sets of pitches I use in the work that motivate everything that happens,” he said. “That’s true of virtually everything I write. In this particular work, I’m using a set of whole-tone pitches. It’s not modal, it’s not tonal, it’s not 12-tone, but what could be seen as whole-tone scale groupings. String chords are spaced in such a way that there are large spaces between each of the voices. That gives kind of an airy sound.”

Zelman Bokser will conduct the UC Irvine Symphony in “Points of Light” today and Saturday at 8 p.m. UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Village Theatre. Also on the program: Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 (soloist: Lincoln Mayorga) and Mendelssohn’s “Italian Symphony.” Tickets: $7, general admission; $6 for seniors and students. Information: (714) 856-6616 or 856-5000.

Those listening to the Garden Grove Symphony on Saturday will get a bit of Shakespearean drama as well, as Laura Mitchell and Wayne Watkins of the Grove Shakespeare Festival act in selections from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Othello,” “Henry V” and “Romeo and Juliet.”

“The idea was to coordinate the efforts of the symphony and the Shakespeare Festival, which are both major events in the city,” said Thomas Bradac, the festival’s producing artistic director.

“There is a great body of music that has been written about Shakespeare’s works. (Originally, we thought) they could present one of these concerts that would wrap around the body of the works.” The idea evolved, Bradac said, into “several small vignettes from the plays that are being used as transition and dovetailing into the concert.

“We’re not putting on a performance underscored by the symphony,” he stressed. “We are trying to give people a flavor of cross-disciplines.

“The two organizations are working much more cooperatively than we have in the past,” Bradac added. “There is a limited amount of dollars available for everybody. But both organizations serve the community and we can work cooperatively to maximize our efforts. We’re both in the same ball park. If this succeeds, I imagine in the future we may try some more experiments.”

Edward Peterson will conduct the Garden Grove Symphony in a “Sounds of Shakespeare” program Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Don Wash Auditorium, 11271 Stanford Ave., in Garden Grove. Music by Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Walton and others will be played. Laura Mitchell and Wayne Watkins of the Grove Shakespeare Festival will present selected scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. Tickets: $10-$25. Information: (714) 534-1103.