Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

For all its amenities, the Alex Theatre in Glendale has never been a great place to listen to music. The sound was muddy, the reverberation time almost nonexistent. People in the balcony were less likely to complain (sound blends and gets better as it travels upward), but musicians were unhappy. They couldn't hear themselves onstage, they said privately. All that has changed. The theater installed a new orchestral shell about two weeks ago, the latest step in its $6.2-million redevelopment project begun in 1992.

Quietly giddy, Sarah Thornblade sat on the couch of a Pasadena home nervously anticipating the encounter. She'd been waiting for this moment for weeks; when it finally came she wasted no time. Thornblade stood, unzipped a soft, green case and extended both hands, carefully lifting her much awaited blind date: an $8-million Stradivarius violin. The connection last week was a test run for a more intimate rendezvous coming Thursday. Thornblade, second violin for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, will play the coveted instrument during the orchestra's all-Bach Valentine's Day concert.

An orchestra of many moving parts, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra does not have a home. Besides its main orchestral series, it has a Westside chamber series, a Baroque series downtown and five fall exclusive foodie fundraisers in classy homes around town. But that orchestral series, given on Saturday nights at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Sunday nights in Royce Hall at UCLA, is LACO's real bread and butter. This season's opener, which I heard at Royce, was a showcase program, itself made up of many moving parts, within which there were more moving parts.

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has received a hefty stocking stuffer this season in the form of a monetary gift from Terri and Jerry Kohl. The couple's $1-million challenge gift is the largest in the organization's history, according to orchestra leaders. The Kohls are the founders of Brighton Collectibles, the Southern California retailer of women's accessories. LACO said the challenge grant -- given with a request for a matching gift -- has already been met by two anonymous donations totaling an additional $1 million.

He spent too much time sitting alone in bars, drinking beer with his face to the wall. He fell for an underage girl whose father disapproved of his bohemian ways, and between smoking, brooding and picking up a venereal disease during his reckless youth, his life's wild swings brought him to an early grave. FOR THE RECORD: 'Music and the Mind' program: An article in last Sunday's Arts & Books section about a coming Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra program titled "Music and the Mind" referred to Robert Schumann's "cheerier, early Violin Quartet in E Flat Major.

In a surprise announcement made Wednesday, German conductor Christof Perick will become the fourth music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at the beginning of the 1992-93 season. Perick, 44, will replace Iona Brown, 50, the English musician who has led the musical fortunes of LACO since 1987. Brown's contract, which ends in June, 1992, was not renewed.

Although Erich Vollmer is leaving the Orange County Philharmonic Society to take over the top administrative post at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra as of Feb. 15, he'll remain a regular presence in Orange County.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - Inside his airy loft last week, Andrew Norman was nervous as he talked about his childhood and God. The 32-year-old composer, a finalist this year for the Pulitzer Prize in music, spoke in anxious halts and starts about his upbringing in "a strict religious environment" in Modesto, where his father is a pastor at an evangelical church. Norman was tense because he rarely spoke about his personal life and wasn't quite sure what to say. And since he had left home as a teenager to study music at USC, he had wrestled with his faith, an inner conflict heard in his music, notably his searing, Pulitzer-nominated work for violin, viola and cello, "The Companion Guide to Rome," a portrait of nine churches and saints.

Gabriel Kahane, best known as an indie singer-songwriter, was his own charismatic singer-songwriter Saturday night in the West Coast premiere of his affecting "Crane Palimpsest" at the Alex Theatre. As he does in a club, he used a microphone and wore jeans. He accompanied himself on guitar and piano. He also had the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on hand, and he gratefully used everything at his disposal to merge pop and new music sensibilities naturally and unpretentiously. Composer-performers who write orchestral pieces for themselves as soloists can these days be anything they like.

Two disparate but highly scenic musical roads originating in Los Angeles--one personal, the other institutional--converge this week, when Jeffrey Kahane leads the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in the opening concerts of its 29th season. Kahane's route to podium glory has been navigated from a piano bench, while the storied path of the chamber orchestra has of late been rocky enough to pass for a quarry. Not, of course, that Kahane and LACO meet as strangers.

Composers of serious concert music who also write for film and television are usually greeted with skepticism, much like novelists who write screenplays. Benjamin Wallfisch is a 33-year-old English composer and conductor who is credited with orchestrating and conducting Dario Marianelli's 2008 Oscar-winning score for "Atonement. " Since then, Wallfisch's own career as a movie composer has taken off. But Wallfisch, who conducted the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on Sunday at UCLA's Royce Hall in the premiere of his Violin Concerto (along with works by Elgar and Beethoven)

An orchestra of many moving parts, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra does not have a home. Besides its main orchestral series, it has a Westside chamber series, a Baroque series downtown and five fall exclusive foodie fundraisers in classy homes around town. But that orchestral series, given on Saturday nights at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Sunday nights in Royce Hall at UCLA, is LACO's real bread and butter. This season's opener, which I heard at Royce, was a showcase program, itself made up of many moving parts, within which there were more moving parts.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - Inside his airy loft last week, Andrew Norman was nervous as he talked about his childhood and God. The 32-year-old composer, a finalist this year for the Pulitzer Prize in music, spoke in anxious halts and starts about his upbringing in "a strict religious environment" in Modesto, where his father is a pastor at an evangelical church. Norman was tense because he rarely spoke about his personal life and wasn't quite sure what to say. And since he had left home as a teenager to study music at USC, he had wrestled with his faith, an inner conflict heard in his music, notably his searing, Pulitzer-nominated work for violin, viola and cello, "The Companion Guide to Rome," a portrait of nine churches and saints.

Though Carl Davis has composed scores for such films as 1981's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," over the past three decades, he's become one of silent cinema's greatest champions, composing and conducting scores for countless silent films as well as orchestrating existing scores for such silents as Charlie Chaplin's 1931 masterwork"City Lights. " In March, the U.S.-born, London-based composer earned kudos for conducting the 46-piece Oakland East Bay Symphony in his score for the restored 5 1/2-hour version of Abel Gance's 1927 epic "Napoleon.

The 23rd Annual Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Silent Film Gala Where: Royce Hall, UCLA When: 6: 30 p.m. Sunday Tickets: $35, $50 Information: http://www.laco.org , (213) 622-7001, Ext. 1

Gabriel Kahane, best known as an indie singer-songwriter, was his own charismatic singer-songwriter Saturday night in the West Coast premiere of his affecting "Crane Palimpsest" at the Alex Theatre. As he does in a club, he used a microphone and wore jeans. He accompanied himself on guitar and piano. He also had the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on hand, and he gratefully used everything at his disposal to merge pop and new music sensibilities naturally and unpretentiously. Composer-performers who write orchestral pieces for themselves as soloists can these days be anything they like.

Ned Rorem is most famous for his frank diaries and for his art songs. But while the diaries have long been combed for dish, the songs have mainly been famous for being famous. Though praised for decades for their direct sentiment and sophisticated poetry, they've fought fashion. But wait long enough and everything changes. Tuneful, old-fashioned songs are back in American music, and a new generation of noted singers has come along to sing them.

A bridge, of course, is a stretch of metal or stone or something that spans, typically, a body of water. But it also unites two disparate things that would otherwise remain disconnected. So it's only fitting that what could prove a breakthrough piece for the polymath young composer Gabriel Kahane is a piece about the Brooklyn Bridge. Kahane was led to this particular structure by his current locale -- he's part of a Brooklyn new-music renaissance -- as well as Hart Crane's 1930 poem "The Bridge," now considered a landmark of modernism.

— When Jeffrey Kahane decided to undertake a survey of Mozart's mature piano concertos to celebrate the composer's 250th birthday, he didn't expect to play all 23 of the works himself. But when scheduling conflicts made hiring other leading soloists impractical, the pianist and music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra decided to take on the feat on his own. "I didn't think of it as a huge project about me, so I wasn't daunted," the musician said at his home in Sonoma's wine country.