CLASSICAL MUSIC : Harmonica Virtuoso, 76, Blows in for SummerPops

Larry Adler is not only the world’s foremost harmonica virtuoso. The septuagenarian musician is also a consummate entertainer with a vaudevillian’s flawless sense of timing.

Adler, who appears four nights this week with the San Diego Symphony’s SummerPops, even taught Johnny Carson a few licks during a guest appearance on the “Tonight” show a couple of seasons back.

After Adler performed his solo, a jazzy set of variations on “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” he chatted with his amiable host and then handed Carson a miniature harmonica and proceeded to rehearse him in a clever duet rendering of the “Blue Danube” waltz. It took Carson four attempts to get his two-note solos in the right place, but Adler finally cajoled him with his banter and finally got the usually unflappable Carson to play it right.

A native of Baltimore who now lives in England, Adler broke into show business at age 14, when he ran away from home to crash the New York City music scene.

“I had won a mouth organ competition, and since I was Baltimore’s best mouth organ player, it went to my head,” Adler explained in a telephone interview last week from London. (As a kind of inverse snobbism, he prefers the nomenclature “mouth organ” to the more respectable “harmonica.”)

“I had stashed away $50 from selling Liberty magazine, so without telling my parents, I got on a train to New York. I got a job playing a traveling road show for Paramount making $100 a week.”

A few years later, Adler was asked to perform on a weekly radio program that was broadcast from Harlem’s famous jazz caldron, the Cotton Club. The feisty Adler held out until the show’s producer promised him that Duke Ellington would conduct when he played his solo.

“I didn’t have clout,” said Adler, “but I had chutzpah.”

Over the years, Alder has premiered compositions written for him by a respectable list of composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Darius Milhaud, and Joaquin Rodrigo. He admited, however, that his ego sabotaged a proposed composition from Aaron Copland.

“I did a really stupid thing when Copland was considering writing for me back in 1939. I started to tell him how to write the piece, and he said to heck with it. I never approached the subject with him again,” said Adler sheepishly.

“When Vaughan Williams composed for me, he asked for a diagram of the notes that can be played on a harmonica, and he pasted the diagram on his shaving mirror to memorize it,” Adler said, adding that despite his careful instructions, the noted British composer still included some unplayable intervals in his 1952 “Romance” for harmonica and orchestra.

Adler plays the “silver concerto” model of Hohner harmonica, which is the Steinway concert grand of harmonicas.

“It’s not exactly custom made,” he said, “but it’s constructed out of silver and steel. The regular wooden frame harmonicas wore out too quickly for me: their frames would warp and the mouthpieces rusted. The silver and steel version, however, is really heavy. I really begin to feel the weight when I play a long concert.”

On this week’s SummerPops program, which opens Wednesday and runs through Saturday night at Hospitality Point, Adler will solo in George Enescu’s “Romanian Rhapsody” and will play several of his own tunes, including “Genevieve Waltz” and “Screws Blues.”

From Moscow with honors. The results from this year’s quadrennial Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, which were announced July 6, included names familiar to the San Diego musical community. Kevin Kenner, the 27-year-old Coronado native who was the only American pianist to make the semifinals of last year’s Van Cliburn competition, tied with two other pianists for the bronze medal (third place) in the Tchaikovsky Competition’s piano division.

La Jolla violinist David Chan, who won the San Diego Symphony’s Young Artist Concerto Competition in 1988, was awarded fifth prize in the Tchaikovsky violin division. Chan, who is only 17 and has performed several times with the San Diego Symphony, is a student of Michael Tseitlin.

The top vocalist award went to Orange County native Deborah Voight, and local audiences will get a chance to hear her--but it’s going to take a couple years. According to the San Diego Opera, the 29-year-old soprano has already been signed to sing one of the lead roles in the company’s 1992 production of Benjamin Britten’s “The Rape of Lucretia.”

Black ink in El Cajon. Although El Cajon’s East County Performing Arts Center is an acoustical and architectural gem, making it a profitable venue has proved a daunting task. After several seasons of red ink, center Manager Dick Childs reported a modest $3,479 profit at the close of the 1990 fiscal year on June 30. Childs also reported that ECPAC now has a $92,000 endowment to assist its programming efforts.

Over the last year, the center has been host to about 250 performances, including drama, symphony, opera workshop and big band music. Sunday at 2 p.m., ECPAC opens its summer Dixieland jazz festival with a performance by the Hot Frogs Jumping Jazz Band from Los Angeles and the local High Society Jazz Band.

Back to nature. Nature lovers who enjoy classical music can enjoy the best of both worlds Sunday afternoon at the Chula Vista Nature Interpretive Center. The Holland-Moritz String Trio, made up of symphony musicians Alex Palamidis, Linda Lukas, and Karla Holland-Moritz, will perform a free concert at 2 p.m. in the Sweetwater Marsh on San Diego Bay. To the strains of Mozart, Haydn, and Vivaldi, visitors can watch the marsh and shore birds. The center advises visitors who want to sit in the shade to bring lawn chairs.