It turns out it’s a player after all

THIS weekend marks the beginning of a new season for a venerable Southland music institution. On Saturday night, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra was booked to play its first program of fall 2005 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Tonight, it is set to offer the second in Royce Hall.

If you’re looking for the group’s highest profile, however, you’ll find it in neither venue. Rather, it towers above the Harbor Freeway at 7th Street: Kent Twitchell’s 80-foot mural of a dozen musicians.

Now 36, the orchestra routinely referred to as LACO doesn’t have the budget to pepper the city with banners or flood news outlets with advertising. Yet despite its modest public image, in musical accomplishment it regards itself as second to none. Indeed, after decades of up-and-down fortunes, wounds selfinflicted and not, it might most appropriately be dubbed “the little orchestra that could.”

“There are three world-class organizations in the musical life of Los Angeles,” says Jeffrey Kahane, the group’s music director and a well-regarded pianist. “The Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Opera and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. And each of them occupies a critical and special place in the cultural life of the city.

“There’s no question that we’re smaller in terms of budget and organization. But in terms of artistic import and the sense of excellence that we bring and try to uphold, we think of ourselves as being not in the shadow of anything.”

This weekend’s programming is typical of what LACO audiences have come to expect: a mix of Baroque, classical, Romantic and contemporary repertory. Like many orchestras, the group also plans to pay major attention to the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Over the new season and the next, Kahane will play all 23 of the composer’s original piano concertos.

In 2005-06, the orchestra is also introducing a rising young star, violinist Daniel Hope; bringing back another young star, cellist Alisa Weilerstein; and premiering a work by a composer in residence, Uri Caine.

Carving out its place

LACO was born in a time of optimism. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion had opened in 1964 as the sparkling new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A charismatic conductor from India, Zubin Mehta, was on the podium.

At the same time, a handful of music lovers -- Joseph F. Troy and James Arkatov, with financial support from Richard D. Colburn, Joan Palevsky, Buddy Sperry and a few others -- felt the city should also have a small orchestra to play repertoire specifically intended for an ensemble no bigger than 45 players.

Visiting groups of that size had come and gone regularly. Henri Temianka had his California Chamber Symphony -- launched in 1960 -- but its concerts, which he conducted for 25 years, were at UCLA. There were two other theaters at the Los Angeles Music Center, both completed in 1967 and seemingly begging for music.

Hollywood film studios provided a pool of dazzling, conservatory-trained musicians to draw from. So in 1969, the newly formed Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra ventured its inaugural season at the Mark Taper Forum on Monday nights, when the theater was otherwise dark.

The first program -- one of four in a trial-balloon series -- consisted of works by Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Mozart and 20th century French composer Albert Roussel, signaling from the beginning that modern music would share the LACO stage with older repertory.

On the podium stood a magician: Neville Marriner, the distinguished British conductor who in 1958 had founded the London-based chamber ensemble the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and made it world-famous. Everything looked golden. People had to be turned away.

“I am astonished by the way these men play,” Marriner said after the inaugural event. “We have the makings of a first-class ensemble already.”

Still, board members knew that launching the orchestra was a risk.

“These start-ups are very, very difficult,” recalls board chairman emeritus Ronald S. Rosen. “You plunk down an orchestra in a community that is devoted to the Philharmonic and that may or may not be ready for it.”

To succeed, LACO had to have a different face. “It couldn’t be a small Philharmonic,” says Rosen. “It had to play a different repertoire, with smaller resources, and offer something different, maybe even unique. That was the purpose of getting Neville Marriner.”

The Taper remained home until it was remodeled around 1978 (and the orchestra was kicked out). The group had failed to become a resident ensemble of the Music Center, and that failure would turn out to be a vulnerability. But by the second season, LACO was already extending its reach, playing in other venues downtown and around the city. It also served across the plaza, in expanded form, as the orchestra for Music Center Opera, the forerunner to Los Angeles Opera.

Marriner remained at the helm until 1978, when he left to head the Minnesota Orchestra. Young American conductor Gerard Schwarz took over, further developing the group’s profile through recordings -- there are 28 to date, compared with the Philharmonic’s 70 -- and through expanded series at UCLA, the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, and in Santa Barbara, Santa Ana, Claremont and San Diego County.

But expansion came at a cost. Growing financial pressures culminated in 1985 with a $200,000 deficit on a $1.4-million budget. It looked as if the organization might fold. Concerts at Ambassador, UCLA and San Diego were canceled, and the hat had to be passed around the boardroom.

“It was a very tough road because we were the small guy,” Schwarz, whose tenure lasted until 1986, says now. “The little guys -- the New York Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra -- all have a different economic life. They’re clearly not the most important institutions in any of the cities I’ve named. All the arts are always fighting for funds. It’s what we do as nonprofits. It’s harder for the little guys.”

In 1986, he was more blunt: “It seemed that all the time I was in Los Angeles, we had financial problems.”

Toward the end, though, Schwarz had been taking the group into larger, more standard symphonic repertory -- the smaller symphonies by Beethoven and Schubert -- and that caused grumbles from LACO and Philharmonic supporters alike.

“One week, we and the Philharmonic both played Bizet’s Symphony in C,” Rosen recalls. “Another time we both did the same Beethoven symphony. We didn’t want to play their repertoire and be in competition with them. But sometimes we stumbled over one another.”

Rosen says the choice as Schwarz’s successor of British violinist-conductor Iona Brown, who had earlier inherited Marriner’s Academy, was intended to draw distinctions.

“When Iona was hired, there could be no doubt what we were. She sat in the first violinist chair leading the orchestra in repertoire that for a chamber orchestra at that time was viewed as being its staple repertoire.”

Moreover, Brown brought an international luster to the group. But maintaining her positions as director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra in Oslo, as well as continuing as guest director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, meant she could not be a consistent presence in Los Angeles.

Hence, when a downturn in the economy precipitated financial problems for LACO again at the end of 1991, the board blindsided Brown by appointing German conductor Christof Perick, principal conductor of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, to replace her, with a three-year term beginning in 1992.

Hearing the news was “a great shock,” Brown, who died in 2004, told The Times. She was “deeply sad -- deeply, deeply sad” about leaving the orchestra.

“It was probably a terrible mistake we parted company with her,” says former board member and arts philanthropist Warner Henry. “I thought she was an ideal person. But she would promise us X weeks a year and never deliver X weeks. She wasn’t lying to us. She was so distracted. If they just expanded the year from 52 weeks to 60, she would have been able to give us those weeks she promised.”

Henry also regrets the lack of a financial cushion that would have come with LACO’s being an official part of the Music Center.

“Without the resources of the Music Center, we had nothing to fall back on. We were in constant terror. We had four or five near-death experiences.”

Perick and the group soon faced catastrophic events outside their control. The 1992 Los Angeles riots forced the cancellation of a downtown series at the Japan America Theatre. The 1994 earthquake shuttered its UCLA home, Royce Hall, shifting Westside audiences to the nearby Wadsworth Theatre for four years. (Royce reopened in 1998.)

The orchestra’s greatest fiscal crisis arose in 1994 -- a $1-million deficit on a $2.3-million budget. The schedule was cut again, and Perick changed his title to “artistic advisor” to reflect his diminished workload. But the orchestra survived only when the board was able to work out a debt repayment schedule with its creditors to avoid going into bankruptcy.

On top of that, in 1995, LACO also lost its home at Ambassador Auditorium when that facility shut down. The group relocated that series to the Alex Theatre, a former vaudeville house and movie palace in Glendale.

But six weeks before the start of the new season, Perick stepped away altogether. So Brown was brought back to serve as principal conductor and musical advisor until Kahane, an L.A. native, took over in 1997.

A passion to perform

THROUGHOUT all this, what kept the musicians going was their feeling of camaraderie and a conviction that they were making excellent music together.

“It was rocky,” says violinist Tamara Hatwan, who joined LACO in 1989. “I remember one night the orchestra got together in someone’s house right after the solvency issue came up to discuss what were we going to do. Things were very unstable. Some orchestras have taken themselves co-op in such situations.

“Nobody was willing to let it go. It was just the quality of the music-making that happens. None of us are there necessarily for financial gain. We have our own ensembles, have studio work -- that’s where we make our living, which supports our habit of wanting to make real artistic excellence.

“Fortunately, the angels came to the rescue and raised enough money.”

(Those angels, who were anonymous in 1994, were Colburn and Henry.)

“It was certainly demoralizing for a while,” says principal horn player Richard Todd, who joined in 1980. “We felt we were in danger of losing something very, very special. But we didn’t.

“One of the great things that happened is that it forced a much better sense of communication between the administration and board and the musicians. That was overdue. That came with an administrative change. When Ruth came in, she really made sure there was an open line of communication. We’re much more in the loop. I’m grateful for that.”

“Ruth” is Ruth L. Eliel, who joined the orchestra at the same time as Kahane. He had been a medal winner at the 1981 Van Cliburn Competition, among other top competitions, and was music director of the Santa Rosa Symphony in Northern California. She had been managing director of the Los Angeles-based Bella Lewitzky Dance Company.

“Between the two of us,” Kahane says, “we had to take an organization that was, frankly, in recovery. It went through a rough patch, but so have so many orchestras around the country.”

Despite the problems, he and Eliel began making plans.

“We wanted the orchestra to make recordings, as it had done in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and see it go on tour,” Kahane says. “It took about five years to build everyone’s confidence in us and raise the money, but within five years we were playing in Carnegie Hall.”

They also have made two recordings, on BMG Classics and Deutsche Grammophon, and are exploring a European tour in 2007-08.

“Eight or nine years ago, people would have been skeptical about all this happening,” Kahane says. “But it’s happened successfully.”

These days -- in contrast to the situation at many U.S. orchestras -- finances are good. LACO ended the last fiscal year on June 30 in the black, “which we’ve done something like eight of the last 10 years,” Eliel says. The budget for the current season is about $3 million.

Ticket sales, Kahane adds, have been “consistently excellent. The renewal rate when we took over was a little over 70%. Recently, it has been steadily in the 90s. We’re in the 99th percentile [of U.S. orchestras] in that respect.”

There are 1,500 subscribers for the concerts at the Alex and Royce, with an additional 600 attending a chamber music series in Zipper Auditorium at the Colburn School of Performing Arts downtown and the family concerts at the Alex.

Kahane and Eliel’s strategy includes a number of key points. They regularly introduce little-known young artists on the verge of major careers. “A special kind of excitement goes with that,” Kahane says. “Local audiences love it when they can say, ‘We heard them here first.’ ”

The two also vary LACO’s repertory by commissioning new works through a “Sound Investment” program, begun in 2001, in which a group of subscribers ante up the necessary funds. For this and the group’s inclusion of other contemporary repertory, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers gave LACO its first award for adventurous programming this June.

Sound Investment is a draw for Tom Van Huss, a 55-year-old financial services consultant who’s been a subscriber since 1995.

“It’s been fantastic to meet with the composers and hear the works develop,” he says. “I’m not as knowledgeable about new music as I should be, and this has opened a lot of windows for me. At our last concert, Jeffrey asked the sponsors to stand up. A person sitting next to me asked later whether I wanted my money back. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said.”

A more recent subscriber, Jennifer Belk, a 38-year-old instructional designer working on a doctorate in education at USC, discovered the orchestra through a school assignment to help nonprofit organizations with their communication needs.

“I was so impressed with them and the passion when they talked about the organization and the music and what they did for the community, when that first concert came around, I thought, ‘I’ve got to check that out,’ ” Belk says.

She became a LACO subscriber this season after going to concerts for a year and a half.

“One of the great differences between a chamber orchestra and a large group,” she says, “is that you feel like you can hear each individual musician. It’s a small enough group that I feel this connection with the music I don’t feel with a larger group. There’s something more individualized, more personalized about the music.”

All the turmoil seems to be a thing of the past. LACO finally appears as stable as that serene mural overlooking the Harbor Freeway, which was completed in 1992.

“We’re very supportive of the group,” says Los Angeles Philharmonic President Deborah Borda. “We see them as friends. I think that to have a number of terrific organizations in the area enlivens our cultural scene. It adds to the wonderful ferment that’s happening to music in Los Angeles.”

So can Eliel finally relax?

“There aren’t a lot of problems,” she says.

But then she adds: “Of course, we always worry about the future. Nothing is guaranteed.”

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Changes in direction

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has taken on personalities as varied and distinct as its successive leaders, up to and including its current music director, Jeffrey Kahane.

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Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

When: 7 p.m. today

Price: $17 to $75

Contact: (213) 622-7001, Ext. 215,

or www.laco.org

This season’s highlights

Special concerts

Nov. 12-13: Uri Caine Ensemble and Jeffrey Kahane. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” times two: the keyboard original and a new version for jazz quintet. Jazz Bakery, 3233 Helms Ave., Culver City.

May 6-7: Chamber music marathon: music from Bach to Osvaldo Golijov, with guests including violinist Cho-Liang Lin, pianists Anne-Marie McDermott and Uri Caine, cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Royce Hall, UCLA.

Subscription concerts

Alex Theatre, Glendale, on Saturdays and Royce Hall, UCLA, on Sundays

Jan. 21-22: Mozart piano concerto marathon begins with Concertos Nos. 5, 9 and 17, with Jeffrey Kahane as soloist and conducting from the piano.

Feb. 11-12: Violinist Daniel Hope makes his Southern California debut playing works by Mozart and Alfred Schnittke.

April 8-9: Edgar Meyer plays the West Coast premiere of his Double Bass Concerto No. 2 along with other works.

May 20-21: New work for piano and chamber orchestra by Uri Caine, LACO composer in residence.