Carnegie Hall

After four decades at Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic is returning to its acoustically blessed old home, Carnegie Hall, officials of both institutions announced Monday. Reached in less than a week of negotiations, an agreement between the 161-year-old orchestra and the 112-year-old concert hall calls for them to form "a single musical performing arts institution," they said, although completing the move will take the Philharmonic at least three years.

Pasadena's famed concert hall, the Ambassador Auditorium, will be demolished unless the community can find a way to preserve it, according to the property's owner, the Worldwide Church of God. Bernard Schnippert, the church's director of finance and planning, said the church's preferred plan for residential development of its 48-acre site -- formerly the Ambassador College campus -- does not include preserving the auditorium, which is known for its superior acoustics.

Miles Davis played Carnegie Hall. So did Pablo Casals and Tchaikovsky. But unlike Brad Halverson, who plays bassoon and saxophone in Nordhoff High School's symphonic band, they didn't have to juggle school work or pitch candy for a chance to play at the fabled New York venue. Brad, 16, is among 120 Nordhoff band and choir students who have been invited to join other award-winning choristers from across the country in performing Mozart's Requiem at Carnegie Hall in April.

Irony was in the air Wednesday night at the Hollywood Bowl with "Big Band Blast," a program featuring two ensembles--the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band--that have lost significant performance platforms. The Clayton-Hamilton aggregation, once the resident jazz ensemble at the Hollywood Bowl, ended its three-year franchise at the close of the 2001 season and was making its only Bowl appearance of 2002.

Nonchalance is not an option when making your Carnegie Hall debut. Just ask 15-year-old Sarah Crespo-Szabo. "I'm so nervous my hands are shaking," the percussionist confides to a cellist moments before the Santa Monica High School Symphony walks onstage. Crespo-Szabo and her 78 orchestra mates had spent months preparing for this moment, and, typical teenagers, many wanted to seem blase.

The only excuse I can offer is that I had never been to Cerritos before. Like Kuala Lumpur and Alpha Centauri, Cerritos was just someplace out there that I never had an occasion to visit. Then came Sunday and Arlo Guthrie. I am a folk-singer junkie and have been ever since Pete Seeger gave Joe McCarthy the finger sometime in the 1950s. So when I heard that Guthrie was going to appear at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, I began saving up. Arlo, his daddy, Woody, and Seeger used to hang out in Topanga, not far from where I live, drinking beer and smoking them funny cigarettes and plunkin' away on their $12 guitars.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani told the first joke Monday night, after the Carnegie Hall audience stood and cheered for him. "One of the reasons I'm here is that things will go back to normal," the mayor said. "This is not normal--some of you should be booing me." Then he said, "I'm here to give you permission to laugh. And if you don't--I'll have you arrested."

ART Looted Klimt Painting Returned: Ending a 13-year legal battle, a French court ordered the city of Strasbourg on Friday to surrender a Gustav Klimt painting seized by the Nazis and later purchased at a discount by local authorities. The court ordered that the 1909 painting "Die Erfuellung" be returned to the children of Jewish Austrian textiles trader and art collector Karl Grunwald, who shipped some of his treasures off to France from Vienna in the late 1930s.

It's a good bet that steel magnate Andrew Carnegie never anticipated that whales would fly in the famous concert hall named for him, nor a pink flamingo play yo-yo. But after a reminiscence from Roy Disney--"It was over 60 years ago that I first heard my Uncle Walt talk about his vision"--a packed house here even saw another era's most well-known Donald, the quacking one, help save the world on Noah's Ark. The longest delayed movie sequel on record finally had its premiere.