Orchestras

For their last 2012 program in Glendale's Alex Theatre Saturday night, Jeffrey Kahane and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra needed no soloists other than Kahane himself. The program was three-fourths American -   Gershwin, Copland and John Adams - with one Czech interloper, Dvorák, who came to America well after the included Serenade for Winds, Op. 44 was written. It easily could have been an all-American program -  there's a universe of superb chamber-orchestra pieces to choose from -  but as it emerged, one could sense some interlocking of gears that made the evening a unified whole.

In the more than three years since Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted his last concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he has not managed to write very much music. Even so, Salonen's recognition as a composer has grown. One of his farewells to L.A. was the premiere of his Violin Concerto, which went on to win a prestigious Grawemeyer Award. His only major new work has been "Nyx. " It had its premiere in Paris last year as the culmination of a Radio France Salonen festival.

Bombay born and Vienna trained, debonair enough to impress Hollywood and with a swashbuckling podium style, Zubin Mehta conducted his first concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic 50 years ago. On Nov. 15, 1962, he was 26, the youngest music director in the orchestra's history, but to observers inside the Philharmonic Auditorium, Mehta came off as unshakably self-confident and strikingly capable. In six more years he would make the cover of Time magazine, an extraordinary feat for a conductor of any age. Thursday night, Mehta and the L.A. Phil will celebrate that anniversary by re-creating the program of Mozart, Hindemith and Dvorák that marked the beginning of his 16 seasons with the orchestra.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic did not become an international leader of orchestras by succumbing to sentimentality. Where other ensembles become fixated on major composers' anniversaries, Angelenos were lucky to get a nod for, say, the bicentennial of Liszt's birth last year. But Witold Lutoslawski is an exception. The eloquent and reservedly revolutionary Polish composer who would have turned 100 next month had a noteworthy relationship with the L.A. Phil. He conducted it regularly during the last decade of his life.

When is a violin not just a violin? Or a horn not simply a horn? The instruments used in period-music ensembles are museum-quality objects brought to life - a bit of European history invigorated by musicians of today. Though most period ensembles are small, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique is an atypical example of a large-scale group that has embraced the pre-modern aesthetic. The orchestra will perform Beethoven concerts Monday and Tuesday at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall as part of a tour that included a recent stop at Carnegie Hall in New York.

What is the sound of a man drowning? Near the end of Alban Berg's "Wozzeck," a 20th century masterpiece about the inevitable humiliation of army life, the protagonist, having slit the throat of his mistress, drowns in a pond as he tries to dispose of the knife. It is not a terrible moment but an end of suffering. Wozzeck is not a terrible man but a victim who becomes, as victims often do when tables are turned, an oppressor. The orchestral effect is that of the release of the final air bubbles, a brief second during an otherwise unrelievedly intense 90-minute opera, and something easy to miss in the opera house.

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)

LONDON - It's late afternoon south of the Thames. Outside Henry Wood Hall, the first winter winds dance leaves and cigarette packages while dusk further smudges an already-gray sky. Inside the deconsecrated Georgian church, a man is being driven to murder. His accomplices, the Philharmonia Orchestra and its principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, are nearly halfway through six hours of rehearsing Alban Berg's first opera, "Wozzeck. " In performance, the title character's transformation from gentle soldier to wife-killer takes just 90 minutes.

Once on a flight to Warsaw in the 1990s, when the Polish airline LOT was still trying to get the hang of market economy, I requested a vegetarian meal. For the first course, I was served the same salad of iceberg lettuce and thousand-island dressing as everyone around me. But my hot entrée, I discovered as I peeled away the foil, was another helping of that salad zapped in the microwave. It took a minute or two for the Pole sitting next to me to stop laughing and wipe his tears away, but he then described how fabulous Polish vegetarian cooking could be. He suggested several dishes I try once I landed and told me where to find them.

There is more bad news in orchestra land. On Friday night the Spokane Symphony went on strike. Members of the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra continue to man picket lines. All this is on top of the recent budget woes and musician disharmony in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Indianapolis that have begun to define orchestral life. Could this finally be the end of the line for the history of the greatest noise-making machine in history?