Rachmaninoff

Several common threads weaving through the Hollywood Bowl season converged Thursday night: the close of the cycle of Rachmaninoff's works for piano and orchestra, the third all-Russian program in the last four Thursdays and the second time this week that the Romeo and Juliet theme was invoked ("West Side Story" on Tuesday was the first).

This is a graphic example of a bargain label taking on a full-priced label in a repertory staple and running them off the court. Lopez-Cobos has built a magnificent orchestra in Cincinnati, but his recordings rarely lift off the pedestrian level (his Mahler Ninth being a glowing exception).

Leonard Zane dismisses Stravinsky's lofty reputation as a "typically intellectual viewpoint" and argues that his music won't endure like that of Rachmaninoff, Sibelius or Vaughan Williams because it doesn't "prove itself to the soul," whatever that means (Letters, March 4). I suppose, then, that those of us who packed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last weekend for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's remarkable performance of "The Rite of Spring" and responded with a unanimous, immediate, deeply felt and emotionally charged extended ovation were just a bunch of soulless intellectuals.

The city of Pasadena, Master Classes International and the Russian Ministry of Culture will announce on Friday a new musical partnership: the 2002 International Rachmaninoff Piano Competition and Festival.

The composer's graduation piece, assigned by Arensky at the Moscow Conservatory and completed in 1892 when Rachmaninoff was 19, is famous as the first of his three one-act operas. It is drawn from Pushkin's poem, "The Gypsies" (read in both Russian and English--the latter by Michael York--on the second, accompanying CD). The story and its form are both comparable to Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" and the style apes Borodin's Orientalisms nicely.

Pianist Jean-Philippe Collard will tell you how difficult it is to make music on the instrument. "The piano is a strange sound. It's not very pure. You have a hammer. It's very hard. It's not a good way to make music, with a hammer. A violin has a wonderful sound; it's natural. A piano--hammers, every day hammers. It's ugly. So you have to correct, to change, to sing."

Pleasant, shirt-sleeve temperatures. A full moon. Rachmaninoff and nothing but. Democrats downtown and their protesters tying up police helicopters. No music-attacking chop, chop, chop; rather just the plush sonic carpet of crickets, to which music sticks like acoustic Velcro. Tuesday was the kind of soft, tropical night for which the Hollywood Bowl was made. And Rachmaninoff fills the Bowl perhaps like no other composer.

Thanks to the movie "Shine," virtually everyone has heard about "Rach 3," or Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. But before "Rach 3," even before "Rach 2," there was "Rach 1," the composer's Opus One. Why don't we hear this work more often than we do? It has a lot of the characteristics we think typical of Rachmaninoff's ultra-Romantic composer's style. Or does it?

Question: Why did the L.A. Philharmonic have packed houses Nov. 11, 12 and 14? Answer: Liadov, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky, Temirkanov and Wattsofsky. SID WEINSTEIN Lakewood