Concerto

Milton Kaye, a pianist and arranger who introduced Dmitri Shostakovich's first concerto to a U.S. audience, toured war zones with violinist Jascha Heifetz and wrote theme music for the TV quiz show "Concentration," has died. He was 97. Kaye died Monday at a New York hospital after battling pneumonia, said his wife of 60 years, actress Shannon Bolin. He served as musical director for shows on all three major networks.

One thing seems to be fairly certain in this city: Give a J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concerto cycle and the people will come. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra used to make a regular habit of it -- and given the line outside the sold-out Walt Disney Concert Hall on Friday night, Bach's box office magic worked for the Los Angeles Philharmonic too. This cycle traveled well down the road of accommodation with the period-performance-practice crowd, without capitulating completely.

The Pacific Symphony concluded the final -- and major -- program in its sixth American Composers Festival on Wednesday night with Lou Harrison's Piano Concerto. Carl St.Clair conducted with spirit. Ursula Oppens, the soloist, played with clarity, grace and strength, her sterling tone more than capable of penetrating and liquefying the dry acoustics of sound-sucking Segerstrom Hall. It was half an hour of heaven. Grand claims were made Wednesday for this concerto, which was written 20 years ago.

IN his brief review of Joshua Bell's new recording of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto ["Aural Histories, the Next Gen: Blooms in a Warmer Climate," Feb. 26], Chris Pasles wrote that the brilliant and popular American violinist "may be the first musician to open up all the traditional cuts in the last movement." He isn't, not by a long shot. The first performer of the piece, Adolph Brodsky, certainly did not make any cuts in it when he premiered the concerto in 1881. The cuts as we know them were introduced later by Leopold Auer and were observed by most of his pupils.

Anthony Marwood is a tall, handsome, affable British violinist who took a tumble last week that could have cost him his life. Leaving a performance in Belgium, he stepped onto what he thought was a path but was actually a frozen pond covered by snow. "It was one of those unbelievable things where something happens and it takes you several seconds to catch up with reality," he says. "My first reality was, 'I can't breathe,' and the second was, 'I'm underwater, and I'm cold!'

The countdown has begun. He was born, 250 years ago Friday, on a bitter cold day in Salzburg, Austria, and baptized the next day as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus. He would eventually assume the Latin form of Theophilus, which is Amadeus, and favor the French, Amade. Come Friday, the Mozart floodgates will open wide. Classical radio stations the world over will play Mozart around the clock, some for days on end.

The technical difficulties of Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 are formidable. But they're outweighed by the interpretive ones. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg met both challenges in a masterly performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, on Friday in the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Two of the movements -- the second and fourth -- are given over to overt display, although there's more to them than that.

I know only part of his story. I know him playing the cello on a dairy crate in the morning sun, suspended somewhere between boy genius and lost traveler. But where does he go after dark? For answers, I've come to skid row in downtown Los Angeles to spend the evening with Nathaniel Anthony Ayers. The sun has dropped behind glittering skyscrapers, and hardened creatures roam the streets. Strung-out prostitutes strut their way down trashed streets.

There were two concertos on the final Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra program of the season -- one new, the other relatively recent, both difficult, both written for instruments that don't often receive that kind of spotlight. The new work is worth getting to know, a Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra by Robert Aldridge. It is a co-commission from the LACO and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra that was unveiled April 6 by the latter group.

Precious little imaginative, first-rate new music turns up for children these days, and now, thanks to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, there is one less such piece. Tan Dun's "Inventions for Paper Instruments and Orchestra," commissioned by the Philharmonic for its first youth concert in Walt Disney Concert Hall last season, is now "Paper Concerto" and appropriated by adults.