Topanga Rallies Around a Happier Cause : Music: With the flooding over, local philharmonic will present its annual outdoor concert Saturday to benefit preschool, Theatricum Botanicum.

The community of Topanga has taken a pounding from Mother Nature this year. Floods, road closures and property damage from the rains have taxed Topangans’ nerves, to say the least. Yet the same community spirit that has seen residents sandbagging each other’s houses and taking in stranded neighboring families is also evident on happier occasions.

One of these is the annual concert of the Topanga Philharmonic, outdoors at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum.

This year’s concert, the 14th of its kind, will take place Saturday at 2 p.m. As before, it will benefit the Topanga Co-Op Preschool and the Theatricum Botanicum and, like last year, it is expected that about 10% of the community’s 7,000 residents will attend.

“Nobody better have a fire because the Fire Department’s there,” said the orchestra’s music director and conductor, Guido Lamell. “Everybody’s there. I think half the stores close. We pretty well shut down Topanga, and there’s not much else happening.”

Partly due to its rustic outdoor setting, the Topanga Philharmonic’s annual concert is about as informal as a symphony performance can be.

“It’s like a family picnic,” said violinist Michael Nutt, who, along with Lamell, has a more traditional year-round job in the violin section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “It’s something we do for the really younger children; it’s fun for them to see the musicians having a good time. We’re dressed casually.”

Nutt, a dignified-looking Englishman, likes to wear a cowboy hat for the occasion. He adds, however, that the music is taken reasonably seriously by audience and musicians.

The personnel of the Topanga Philharmonic change slightly each year. Most of the players are free-lance instrumentalists, and about a fifth are Topanga residents. A few are even borrowed from the other local orchestra, the Topanga Symphony.

“This is the world’s most elbow-greased orchestra,” Lamell said with a laugh. “It’s difficult to put together a group of 50 to 60 players on a non-paid basis. It took me 30 calls to find a second bassoon player last year.

“We do have a few people who make it a real point to be there. In Topanga, they talk about this magical ‘Spirit of Topanga.’ What is that? It’s the few die-hards who have decided that this is something they believe in and year after year say, ‘Well, call me again next year--I really enjoyed it.’ For the same reason, some people live out in Topanga; some of us like to play out there.”

The Spirit of Topanga also lives in the volunteers who organize the event. Most are the parents of the 28 children who attend the Co-Op Preschool--including, this year, a parent who was herself a child in the Co-Op in its early days 20 years ago.

“They’re just a multitalented mob,” concert coordinator Jillian Green said in praise of her volunteers. “It’s a phenomenal event, but they work very hard from January on, pretty much organizing everything.

“We call on Topanga itself, which is a very community-oriented community,” Green said. “Topanga’s the closest thing that L. A. County’s got to the small town. And I think that Americans are really, in their hearts, looking for the small town, especially if they have children.”

The theme of this year’s concert is “Tell Me a Story.” The program will feature storytellers on stage before the downbeat and during intermission. A custom-made “story quilt” will be raffled off near the concert’s conclusion. The quilt is the result of the children in the preschool being asked to each draw their favorite story on a 10-inch-square piece of paper. The drawings were sent to two Pennsylvania craftswomen who created quilt pieces from them.

The storytelling theme is also reflected in the major musical work of the program, Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite “Scheherazade.” The title, of course, is the name of the “1001 Nights” heroine, the bride of a murderous sultan, who was obliged to tell stories, literally, to save her life. At 46 minutes long, and with complex orchestration, the piece is a challenge for any orchestra. It is especially so for the Topanga Philharmonic since its only opportunity to rehearse together is on morning of the concert.

The limited rehearsal time, the acoustically volatile outdoor setting and the informal family atmosphere of the concert can make it quite a trick for the music director to select the right repertoire.

“I lose a lot of sleep over trying to decide on the program,” said Lamell, 39, who inherited the baton of the Topanga Philharmonic three years ago from founding music director Roger Bobo. “I look at the outdoor amphitheater and I try to imagine what will sound good out there. I try very hard to pick music that is fun--fun for the players and fun for the listeners.”

He describes another piece on the program, the Concertante in A Major for Four Violins by 19th-Century composer Ludwig Maurer, as “one of the most fun concertos I’ve ever heard or seen.” Also on the bill is Rossini’s overture to “The Barber of Seville.” Lamell admits that he got the idea to include this piece after watching Bugs Bunny conduct it in a Warner Bros. cartoon.

“Rossini overtures are the most fun things in the world,” he said. “I could make a steady diet of them.”

Two works that traditionally open the concert are the rousing “Topanga Fanfare,” composed especially for the orchestra by Topanga resident Fred Tackett, and an orchestrated version of “This Old Man,” to which the children of the Co-Op Preschool parade, shyly but delightedly, around the stage, led by a pied-piperesque flutist. The concert closes each year with John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” which will be conducted this year by an orchestra member whose name will be drawn at random.

Of course, the very rain that has caused the people of Topanga so much anxiety this year has caused the environs of the Theatricum Botanicum to be more than usually bright with wildflowers. Still, the threat of rain falling on concert day is part of the challenge of producing the event.

“For the past seven years, it’s been miraculous,” said Lamell, unapologetically knocking on wood. “It’s been predicted rain; we’re all grief-stricken and we’re saying, ‘Oh no! It can’t rain because there’s been so much work!’ And we cannot have a postponement date.

“Last year, it was raining early that morning, and it was raining hard a few days before. Then, suddenly, by about concert time, the sun started to come out and it was just unbelievable.

“It’s practically a religious experience when that happens.”

The Topanga Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Guido Lamell, will play at 2 p.m. Saturday at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd. Advance tickets: $10, $5 senior citizens and children 6 to 12; at the gate: $12.50, $7.50 senior citizens and children 6 to 12; children under 6 free. Call (310) 455-3453.