MUSIC REVIEW : A ‘Degenerate’ Night at the Philharmonic

or aesthetically--incorrect were called “cultural bolshevists.” They wrote “degenerate music”-- Entartete Musik .

It was dangerous. It was banned.

The Nazis liked pretty tunes. They didn’t like dissonance, much less atonality. They didn’t like intellectual experiments. They didn’t like jazz, which was regarded as a corrupting import from primitive Africa via decadent America.

They certainly didn’t like any composer or performer who happened to be Jewish.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is paying a lot of attention to the Third Reich and its victims these days. A potentially terrifying, somewhat incoherent, frequently malfunctioning exhibit of historic German documents and films is on display in the foyers of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. A program of chamber works by Ernst Krenek, the 90-year-old enfant terrible from Vienna via Palm Springs, was presented by the New Music Group on Monday. A sprawling five-hour symposium, adorned with musical illustrations, is scheduled this afternoon at 1:30.

The main event in the retrospective, however, began on Thursday when Lawrence Foster conducted the full orchestra in the first of three subscription concerts devoted to four vastly dissimilar composers from Austria and Germany: Krenek, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. They made strange billfellows.

The program bore a simple title: “Degenerate Music.” The catch-all turned out to be a bit misleading. Two works on the agenda--Krenek’s “Symphonic Elegy” and Korngold’s Violin Concerto--were written in the United States during the mid-1940s.

In the case of the expatriate Korngold, revered as a Hollywood court-composer during the war years, the degenerate label seemed particularly outrageous. The Violin Concerto, after all, is a treacly exercise in pop-oriented sentiment. The Nazis would have loved it, hailed it as a masterpiece for the ages, if only fate had qualified Korngold as an Aryan.

For better or worse--probably worse--Korngold’s unabashedly lush showpiece served as centerpiece of the program. Sidney Weiss, the dauntless Philharmonic concertmaster, brought lyrical purity and expressive poise to the slush-pump rhetoric. He could not ennoble the platitudes as Jascha Heifetz did in the good old days--who could?--but he did earn gratitude for graceful restraint under slurpy pressure.

Despite a few fleeting moments when the soloist and orchestra threatened to part company, Foster provided a sympathetic symphonic framework. He actually reinforced the swollen indulgences with a reasonable facsimile of sweeping conviction.

Compared to the Korngold concerto, Krenek’s “Elegy”--composed a year later, in memory of Anton Webern--sounds like a model of exquisite understatement. It projects romantic pathos with a highly personalized adaptation of serial techniques, and makes a decided virtue of brevity. Foster and the Philharmonic defined the translucent textures and motivic convolutions with poetic precision.

They brought similar poetic precision after intermission to Kurt Weill’s “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” for winds, but here the delicacy and refinement seemed misplaced. Mack the Knife and his three-penny cohorts emerged a bit overdressed in context. A little more sleaze, a trace of honky-tonk tinsel would have been welcome.

No stylistic problems beset Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” symphony, a specific object of Nazi persecution, which ended the evening. Here, an obviously inspired Foster mustered brilliant splashes of symphonic color, sensitive strokes of dramatic introspection and mighty outbursts of climactic thunder.

Too bad so many subscribers missed the climax of the evening. The Hindemith was preceded, for some reason, by a massive audience exodus. Kurt Weill’s rinky-dink tunes apparently are a hard act to follow.

The concert will be repeated for the last time tonight at 8. The “Degenerate Music” exhibit continues at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through April 27. It can be seen Thursdays through Saturdays from 1 to 5:30 p.m., and during intermissions at concerts.