An ear for art, as well as an eye

Art circles buzzed with last month’s news that private art collectors Janice and Henri Lazarof had notably enriched the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Modern art holdings with their donation of 130 works by major artists. With last week’s opening of LACMA’s three-plaza-level Modern art galleries, much of the collection is now on display.

But Henri Lazarof, a veteran composer of orchestral and chamber music and professor emeritus of composition at UCLA, has something else to contribute: the “Modern Collection Celebration Concert” at 4 p.m. Saturday at LACMA’s Bing Theatre. Part of the museum’s “Art & Music” performance series, it will include two Lazarof works, one a world premiere.

Performed by leading local chamber music artists -- pianists Bernadene Blaha and Kevin Fitz-Gerald, cellists Ronald Leonard and Peter Myers, and violinist Ida Levin -- Saturday’s program will feature Stravinsky’s “Duo Concertante,” Debussy’s “En Blanc et Noir” and Lazarof’s “Ensemble III for 2 Violincelli and 2 Pianos” and his new “Concerto for 2 Pianos.”

The new concerto pays homage to Stravinsky, “whom I had the privilege of meeting at a recording session,” Lazarof says. “It’s a very special memory, meeting a genius.”

“Ensemble III” is dedicated to painter Wassily Kandinsky, “one of the great masters of the 20th century. And I think that will be sufficient for one concert.”

Many composers have been interested in painting and sculpture, Lazarof observes. Similarly, he points out, many artists, such as Paul Klee, who was an accomplished violinist, have been involved in, and influenced by, music. But Lazarof’s music isn’t intended as an illustration of any specific artwork, he cautions. “It’s more a resonance from one artist to another.

“Music exists in time, while art exists in space. Of all the arts, the most abstract one is music,” he says. Lazarof looks for the considered, intellectual control and natural creative pulse of the artist in a piece of art, “and then my reaction to it is musical.”

-- Lynne Heffley