Schoenberg, Sure, but Bach Too

Leonard Stein--trim, fast-moving, white-haired at 79--is nothing if not formidable. As a young pianist back in the ‘30s, he was composer Arnold Schoenberg’s right-hand man, and he went on to become the founding director of the Schoenberg Institute at USC, as well as a living repository of all things Schoenbergian.

For six decades, he taught upcoming generations of musicians at nine local colleges and universities, including UCLA, UC San Diego and CalArts, in addition to USC. At the same time, he was a ubiquitous presence--playing, writing program notes, occasionally conducting--in the seminal Monday Evening Concert series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Since his retirement from the Schoenberg Institute in 1991, Stein has been in demand around the world as a lecturer and roving scholar. And he remains, as always, an active, concertizing pianist.

“When I first met him,” says a much younger keyboardist-about-town, Gloria Cheng, “he terrified me.” It was the mid-’70s, and Cheng, a student at UCLA, had been invited to perform at the institute. “I was playing Schoenberg’s Opus 19 pieces in the concert room and he wandered in,” Cheng remembers. “He listened for a while and then commented: ‘Well, that’s not pianissimo.’ Coming from him, it really bothered me.”

But, Cheng says, as a doctoral candidate at USC a few years later, she got to know him better. “It came to me that there was no reason to be afraid of him,” she says. “He’s just a sweet man who knows a lot.”

Now, Stein and Cheng and a handful of other pianists are partners in Stein’s latest contribution to Southern California music history. Two years ago, he thought of filling a gap in the local performance scene by starting up a new recital series of, by and for the players. Tuesday night at the series’ usual venue, the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena, Stein will close Piano Spheres’ second season with an eclectic agenda that goes a long way toward explaining what the series is all about.

His program combines works by Bach, Dallapiccola, Sessions, Hanns Eisler and a Piano Spheres commissioned-work by Joel Feigen.

Esoteric--and mostly 20th century programming, yes? “Yes, but,” Stein replies, resisting the pigeonhole.

“We did not start the series just to hear new or recent music. The first purpose was to give us, the pianists, a chance to play interesting repertory, [repertory we] wanted to pursue, music that is unusual or neglected.” It just happens, Stein notes wryly, that music written in this century also fits that description.

“Variety is the main thing,” he insists, in his quiet but persistent way.

Since its beginnings in 1994, Piano Spheres’ principals--at that time Stein, Vicki Ray, Mark Robson and Susan Svrcek (Gloria Cheng joined in the second season)--have “met several times a year to put the programs together,” Stein says.

“I never tell anyone what to play. It does happen, however, that these people all have a leaning toward music of our own century.”

But not exclusively. Next season, for instance, on the opening program, composer-pianist Robson will introduce his 24 Preludes for the Left Hand, but he will also play “Reminiscences de Norma” by Franz Liszt.

According to the players, Piano Spheres has had a grass-roots feel from the beginning.

“The series was Leonard’s brainstorm,” Svrcek says. “Then the four of us sort of put it together. We went to see the old Steinway at the Neighborhood Church. The room was nice, and the piano almost as good as we wanted.

“But, for the first concert, Leonard brought in his own [Steinway] piano. After that, Vicki and I went to see [piano dealer] David Abell. He helped us out by providing the Fazioli for all our subsequent concerts.

The series has attracted growing audiences and enthusiastic reviews. But the pianists aren’t in any hurry to formalize the proceedings. “We’re not sure we want to get into all that trouble of recruiting a board of directors, raising money, etc.,” Svrcek says. Adds Stein: “Eventually, we may need to get a manager and to incorporate. But we are not yet at quite that point.

“Our budget is a deficit,” he says, only half joking. “We pay as we go. The church gives us a nice break on the rental, we have a small subscription list and we pay additional expenses out of our own pockets. This is purely a cooperative venture.”

Svrcek says, “Leonard has set up a bank account for the series. We sometimes share some small profits, but mostly the money from tickets goes back into the series.

“Each player pays for the cartage [of the loaned Fazioli]; we also take care of the printing of fliers, and each of us is responsible for mailing postcards out before our recitals. We divvy up the costs and the labor of mailing.”

Svrcek, like Robson, Ray and Cheng, is a former student of Stein’s, having worked with him at CalArts in the late 1960s. As with Cheng, student and teacher first connected over Schoenberg’s music.

“One of my first experiences [in 20th century music] was talking to him about Schoenberg’s ‘Ode to Napoleon,’ ” Svrcek remembers. “Leonard explained that it was not as difficult as I was imagining. He sat down at the piano and ripped through it, showing me its main features. My jaw dropped--it was such a demonstration. Years later, I realized how well he must have known the score, but what he did was still a feat.”

These days, Stein is mostly focused on preparing for his Tuesday night performance. When Piano Spheres debuted, he gave a daunting opening program, the complete works for solo piano by Arnold Schoenberg, which The Times called “triumphant.” Like the others in the group, he is scheduled to perform in the series once a season.

On Tuesday, he will play only the second new work that Piano Spheres has commissioned, a piece based on the sixth of Schoenberg’s Opus 19 piano pieces. Feigen was chosen, says Stein, in the tradition of the series, as an antidote “to all the familiar names we see.”

One of the three other pieces indirectly traces Feigen’s antecedents. There is Roger Sessions’ Five Pieces from 1975; Feigen, who came to California from Colombia University two years ago, was a student of Sessions. Luigi Dallapiccola, a contemporary of Sessions, is represented by his variations, “Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera” (1952).

The other work on the program is Hanns Eisler’s Third (and final) Sonata, which Stein first played in 1945, two years after it was written. Stein thinks that Eisler, a composer for film who was for a while a member of the emigre community in Los Angeles, has never gotten his due. “He never really caught on, and I can’t explain it,” Stein says. “He is usually compared to [Kurt] Weill, and the quality of his work holds up in such a comparison.”

Beginning each half of this program, Stein will play a Bach Prelude and Fugue, as, he says, “a way of relating the polyphonic mastery of Bach to the contrapuntal language of the present century.”

Although Stein is clearly looking forward to his performance, he tends to downplay his role in the Piano Spheres series in favor of getting out the news about his younger colleagues. “There is so much talent here [in Los Angeles],” he says. “Sometimes we can help them find places to play and audiences willing to hear them.”

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PIANO SPHERES, Neighborhood Church, 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena. Date: Tuesday, 8 p.m. Prices: $10-$15. Phone: (213) 851-2965.