A Sweet Note of Harmony Amid a City’s Mayhem

It was not a conventional time for thoughts of beauty. It was last week. The nation was fixated on bigotry and violence. Mary Senkler knew this. She keeps up with the news. Still, she rose early, as she has every Tuesday and every Thursday of every summer since 1978.

By 7:30 a.m., while bulletins in other homes updated the latest sorrow (Granada Hills, one dead, Furrow confesses, wounded recovering), the elderly woman was on her way to her bus stop, just up the street from the Hollywood apartment where she has lived for decades now. A discerning eye could have caught her through the rush-hour haze on the boulevard: a small, dignified figure in her 80s, dark red hair, bright red lipstick. Nice slacks, navy blazer. Big dark glasses over cornflower blue eyes.

Two buses--this is how she gets to her semiweekly summertime destination. Two buses, and by breakfast, you’re at the Hollywood Bowl. A short stroll up the hill and suddenly your perspective gives way to a deeper vision, a view that is no less compelling for its quiet. Blue skies. The fragrance of cut grass and dew.

On this morning of turbulence elsewhere, as on so many other mornings, Mary Senkler slipped into her favorite seat, the aisle seat in the first box, stage right, sitting for free in a spot where someone rich and lucky no doubt dined the night before. There, she waited. First, there were birds, chirruping. Then voices. Then the footsteps of the musicians, shuffling in in jeans and T-shirts for rehearsal. Then the hush. And finally the beauty, even on this day: Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, in the hands of the Russian National Orchestra and the gray-haired pianist Vitaly Margulis, in reading glasses. As radios and TVs across the city crackled with hate crime, the baton went up. And the music rose.

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“I’ve seen Alicia de Larrocha, the Spanish pianist, playing Mozart. And Alfred Brendel,” Mary was saying, her blue eyes twinkling. “And Joshua Bell. He was a disappointment. He played Sibelius, a violin concerto. It wasn’t so hot. But I liked Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. I saw her this year. She played Mendelssohn. Oh, it was beautiful. Some people didn’t like it, but I thought she was very exciting. The way she played, she just had a way of saying, ‘You better like me!’ ” Mary laughed and laughed.

For 21 years, she said, she has been coming to these 9 a.m. summer Bowl rehearsals, which are open and free to the public, missing only once, when a pipe burst at home. Music is her passion, and once she’d hoped it might also be her livelihood. Her mother was a concert pianist in her native Canada, and Mary had come to Los Angeles to study opera as a girl. “I sang high soprano, coloratura soprano,” she remembered. “But it didn’t work out. I didn’t have enough confidence in myself.”

The love of the music, however, never waned. And when she finally retired, unmarried and childless, from her day job as secretary at a bank, friends directed her to these mornings at the Hollywood Bowl. Bob Ginn, the Bowl’s landscape supervisor, says she has since become an honored fixture at the summer rehearsals, known for her constant presence and her encyclopedic knowledge of the music. Each summer, she snaps photos of the musicians on stage and then brings them backstage the following year as mementos. The conductor Eri Klas bounded over to give her a bear hug during his most recent Bowl rehearsal, attended by about 100 spectators. “He said, ‘Hello there! How are you!’ ” Mary reminisced, giggling, “just as nice as he could be.”

The pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet was so taken with her that he gave her tickets to one of his night performances last summer. Two members of the Rossetti String Quartet, wonderful young men with a house near Griffith Park and a BMW and a little dog, periodically come by her apartment to treat her to lunch, she says.

“If there is royalty here, it’s Mary,” smiles Gerald Polevoi, 74, a retired schoolteacher from Valley Village who is another rehearsal regular. “Mary is the Princess of the Rehearsal, the Duchess of the Hollywood Bowl.”

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Through the morning, we sat surrounded by the lilting music, the ruffling of sheet music, the conductor singing along “bup-bup-bup!” over the staccato notes. Though it had not seemed a day on which the world’s ugliness could be matched by any countervailing power, some mysterious force seemed inexorably to lift us. The sun warmed the band shell until it was as if this place held nothing but beauty and the love of it.

The world is weak and shot through with madness. Hearts can be primitive, minds unhinged. Sickness plagues us, but listen past it--so much else is just as constant: the summer, the music, the Duchess with her aged hands clasped, transported, asking you to listen, listen now, to the violins.

Shawn Hubler leaves today for three weeks’ vacation. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.