San Diego Spotlight : Negyesy to Play Cage Etudes at Modest UCSD Birthday

Times are tough, even in La Jolla. Earlier this season, a debutante ball was canceled because the young women’s parents couldn’t come up with the money to stage the annual extravaganza. And, next week at UC San Diego, the music department will mark its 25th anniversary with unusually modest festivities.

In the past, the department has put on weeklong festivals with international guest performers and speakers. The 1986 Pacific Rim Festival featured, among others, composers John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow and Nam June Paik. The 1990 Xenakis Festival brought the noted Greek architect-composer, Iannis Xenakis, to the La Jolla campus for a week. Such events have added cachet to the music department’s reputation as one of the world’s major centers for contemporary music.

But these lean times are limiting next week’s birthday partying to performances by resident musicians--violinist Janos Negyesy and SONOR, the department’s contemporary music ensemble.

Negyesy will give the first U.S. performance of Cage’s Freeman Etudes XVII-XXXII at 8 p.m. Tuesday in the university’s Warren Lecture Hall Studio A. This extensive work for solo violin continues the sequence of Cage’s first 16 Freeman Etudes, which Negyesy premiered in 1984 in Torino, Italy. Cage named the etudes after Betty Freeman, the Beverly Hills philanthropist who commissioned them.

According to Negyesy, when he performed the first installment of Cage’s demanding avant-garde work--80 minutes of unrelenting abstraction--he encountered unexpected hostility. A claque of Cage haters in the audience began to throw things at him.

“First I thought, well, it is just the usual spontaneous protest. They will get tired, go to sleep, and leave. But after half an hour, I knew that it was not spontaneous, but organized. They wanted to force me to stop.

“Then a glass of water crashed one meter from where I stood, and I thought, ‘This is it!’ It could hurt me or the violin. But, since it was only a few minutes before the end, I thought, ‘If I die, then, this is it.’ ”

Fortunately, both the music and the intrepid violinist survived the performance. When Negyesy returned to Italy last July, this time to a festival in Ferrara, the reception of Cage’s second installment of Freeman Etudes--another 80-minute marathon for solo violin-was much more cordial.

SONOR will offer a smorgasbord of compositions by six UCSD composers when it performs at 8 p.m. Thursday in Studio A. Negyesy will solo in Roger Reynolds’ 1990 chamber concerto “Personae,” a striking work written for him by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. Rand Steiger’s clarinet quintet “Woven Serenade,” a 1991 commission for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, features clarinetist Robert Zelickman, and SONOR’s resident vocalists Carol Plantamura and Philip Larson will sing Will Ogdon’s Sea Chanteys. Two solo works, Joji Yuasa’s “Terms of Temporal Detailing” for bass flute and Brian Ferneyhough’s “Bone Alphabet” for percussion, complete the program.

Besides celebrating the department’s birthday, these two performances will honor Freeman, who has donated her personal collection of contemporary composers’ scores, recordings and correspondence to the UCSD Library. Freeman’s generous birthday present to the university was announced in January.

New Professor. Indiana University’s Harvey Sollberger will join the UCSD music faculty this fall, UCSD music department chairman Carol Plantamura said Thursday. Composer, flutist, conductor and authority on contemporary American music, Sollberger has visited the UCSD campus on many occasions to lecture and perform with SONOR. For New World Records’ 1990 compact disc devoted to the music of Roger Reynolds, Sollberger conducted members of SONOR and the San Diego Symphony in Reynolds’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “Whispers Out of Time.”

Opera tour. Opera buffs who want to take in this summer’s Santa Fe Opera season might want to look into a tour offered by MiraCosta College’s community services program. A maximum of 20 persons can attend four operas Aug. 10-14 under the guidance of Vere Wolf, retired music librarian of the San Diego Public Library and longtime lecturer for San Diego Opera. Wolf will lecture on each opera: Johann Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus,” Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,’ and Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.” Mary Rose, local opera buff who has attended the Santa Fe summer festival for the past five years, will act as guide to local points of interest. For tour information, call the college 757-2121, Ext. 485.

Local notes. As of Thursday, Michael Murphy officially replaced Patricia Mannino as company administrator for the San Diego Opera. Murphy was general manager of the San Diego Repertory Theatre. Mannino had been with the local opera company 14 years. . . . The Classical Music Society, a social group for music lovers, will celebrate its 10th anniversary at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Fellowship Hall of San Diego’s University Christian Church. . . . The Gennaro Trio returns to the Lyceum Theatre on Monday for a free noontime concert sponsored by San Diego Mini-Concerts. Gennaro will play Beethoven’s Trio, Op. 121a and Chausson’s G Minor Trio, Op. 3.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

BRAHMS’ ‘GERMAN REQUIEM’ IN PACIFIC BEACH

Next week, most Christians celebrate the solemn days of Holy Week. One of the loftier observances will be Friday when the Chancel Choir of Christ Lutheran Church in Pacific Beach performs Johannes Brahms’ “German Requiem” at 7 p.m. The choral work, based on texts drawn from Luther’s German translation of the Bible rather than the traditional Latin Mass of the Dead, sounds a universal message of hope. Kim Allison will direct and sing the soprano solos; Edwin Krug is the bass soloist.