USC’s Leonard Stein Taking Last Bow

Leonard Stein, director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC, gives his last performance in that capacity this week. He announced his retirement during a recent interview at the university.

After 16 years as head of the institute, Stein says, without rancor, “Enough is enough.” Appointed director in 1975, the genial pianist/conductor, who served as teaching assistant to Schoenberg before the composer’s death in 1951, oversaw the opening of the USC facility in 1977. He says a search has already begun for his successor.

“Things go along here, and I have no regrets,” he says. “As with most archives, we are sometimes frustrated because we feel the world at large is not making use of our resources.”

But, he adds, that’s a generic problem, one often reiterated by curators and museum directors.

“We are proud, at least, to have made our facility easily accessible to musicians and scholars from all over the world.”

The institute has also regularly programmed retrospectives, which are the ongoing business of an archive, said Stein.

To demonstrate the truism again, Stein and his colleague, violinist Rose Mary Harbison, have mounted a program of music by Schoenberg and Ferruccio Busoni and will perform it at the Schoenberg Institute Tuesday at 8 p.m.

A program juxtaposing works by Schoenberg and Busoni? By the difficult Austrian-American and the philosophical Italian-German? The two musicians, who flourished in pre-World War I Europe, would seem to be an odd couple.

“Actually, they thought a lot of each other,” Stein says, “And even carried on a serious and fascinating correspondence.”

The actual genesis of the Schoenberg/Busoni agenda that Harbison and Stein will play--including Busoni’s Second Violin Sonata and Piano Sonatina No. 1 and Schoenberg’s Phantasy for violin and piano and two of his pieces from Opus 11--was a conference on Busoni held in Florence, Italy, in 1985 and attended by Stein.

“The two composers--Busoni was the elder, of course, and a very important person in the world of music when the younger Schoenberg first made his acquaintance--had a lot to say to each other, despite their temperamental differences,” Stein explains.

“At the time, Schoenberg was just beginning to make his way. He needed performances of his music, and he needed a publisher. The two musicians became friends and started to write to each other.”

With the recent reunification of Germany, Stein points out, the Busoni archives, formerly housed in the East, are now available. The 74-year-old pianist, conductor and musicologist reminds us that among Busoni’s many students and proteges were Kurt Weill, Percy Grainger, Egon Petri, Rudolf Ganz, Alexander Brailowsky and Dimitri Mitropoulos.

“His influence was enormous, and his music was played by everybody--every pianist, every symphony orchestra.” Only in recent decades has Busoni’s name disappeared from concert programs.

Centerpieces of the Tuesday agenda are two of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11. Stein will play No. 2 in its transcription by Busoni, followed by No.3, just before intermission. The entire second half will consist of Busoni’s Second Sonata for violin and piano (1898), a work seldom heard but which Stein says he prefers to the enormously popular Sonata by Cesar Franck.

About the transcription, which he calls a filling-out of Schoenberg’s musical ideas, Stein recalls that Busoni chided the younger composer for his brevity: “He wrote to Schoenberg, ‘You have made conciseness into a mannerism.’ ”

Stein describes Busoni the transcriber as one who goes beyond merely transferring a work from one medium to another:

“In his transcription of the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, for instance, Busoni does not merely re-create the work. He actually makes a commentary on it.”

Since first performing in public together--at the ASI--three springs ago, the Harbison/Stein duo has appeared at Harvard, Duke and Wisconsin universities, among other places. After Tuesday’s performance, they take their Busoni/Schoenberg program to UC San Diego on Thursday.

Also, they are planning, after Stein’s retirement as director of the institute in June, a European tour in the 1991-92 season. Harbison (who is married to former Los Angeles Philharmonic composer-in-residence John Harbison) also will be soloist in Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto with the Ventura County Symphony, when Stein appears as guest conductor with that orchestra in November.