CSUN Symphony to Take a Bit of America to Europe This Summer

Each summer, audiences across Europe participate in an old American tradition as young classical musicians froS. universities tour the cities where Beethoven, Liszt, Mozart and other composers spent their lives. In June, the Cal State Northridge Symphony will embark on its first trip to Europe in at least 10 years--as long as the needed funds are raised.

“It’s where classical music started, especially in Vienna with Mozart and Stradivarius violins,” said Cynthia Snyder, 26, a violist with the symphony. “So it’s like a trip to Mecca, a pilgrimage.”

The decision to send the CSUN Symphony on the tour this year was based in part on the recent “opening up” of Eastern Europe, said David Aks, a music professor and conductor of the symphony. “This is an educational experience,” added Aks, who was himself a student cellist at Ohio’s Oberlin College when he first toured the United States.

“All the other major ensembles of our school have toured abroad, but for some reason the orchestra never has,” Aks said. The symphony’s last tour was a trip through Northern California two years ago. “It’s bigger, and it’s more difficult to tour with an orchestra, with percussion instruments and basses.”

The two-week CSUN tour is scheduled to begin June 18 and will take the symphony first to Vienna, then to the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, to Prague for the New World International Festival of Music, and finally to Berlin. “From there, the students are free to go,” Aks said. “And for many of them, this will be the first time they have been to Europe.”

The symphony’s performances are to focus largely on American composers, including excerpts from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” and works by Samuel Barber and Los Angeles composer William Kraft. The symphony is also planning to perform music from Russian Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9.

“They don’t get much American music over there,” Aks said. “They don’t want to hear Americans come to Europe to play European music, because they do it and sort of think they do it better.

“There are so many tourists over there during the summer that there are audiences all over the place, and you can play to some really packed houses.”

Besides the inevitable sightseeing scheduled for each city along the tour, Aks said he’s hoping for maximum contact with musicians at the European universities. “It’s costing everybody a lot of time and money, and we had better make it worthwhile.”

The main concern now, however, is with raising the $1,500 in travel costs for each of the nearly 60 musicians. Fund-raising efforts so far have included a crafts fair of professional vendors on the campus in December--which will be repeated April 25 and 26--and a variety of student gigs at local weddings and bar mitzvahs.

“It’s a hard year to be touring, and the university has taken some serious hits from the budget crisis in the state,” Aks said. “We’re working as hard as we possibly can to make this happen, because these kids deserve it.”

“Everybody is going to practice a lot harder, just because we’re going to play in a lot of cities,” said Snyder, who also teaches music to elementary and junior high school students. She’s been a member of the symphony “off and on” since 1983, as she’s earned a bachelor’s degree and a teaching credential and, more recently, begun work on a master’s degree. “It’s actually the first time we’ve ever done something this big.”

Added Aks: “We don’t plan to stoop to selling candy bars door-to-door. But we certainly will do lots of other things.”

MORE CLASSICS: The “Sundays at Four” chamber music series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art continues today with a performance by the Los Angeles Mozart Chamber Ensemble. The free concert, which is also to be broadcast live at 4 p.m. on KUSC (91.5 FM), will spotlight compositions by Mozart and Beethoven.

Performing will be Catherine Del Russo on oboe, Emily Bernstein on clarinet, Ned Treuenfels on horn, Charles Coker on bassoon and pianist Lucinda Carver.

On Feb. 16, the series continues with Beethoven piano trios as performed by pianist Paulina Drake, violinist Roger Wilkie and cellist Stephen Erdody. And on Feb. 23, pianist Jonathan Shames, a Dame Myra Hess recitalist, performs works by Mozart and Liszt.