Zdenek Macal

The Grammy Awards' move next year to the arena setting of New York's Madison Square Garden is designed to add excitement to the annual ceremony. And the decision--announced Wednesday at a New York press conference--is already causing a stir in the music industry.

Now about to begin its sixth summer season, Yehuda Gilad's Malibu-based Strawberry Creek Festival continues to grow. But, says Gilad, "not too fast." The festival is a training school as well as a series of summer concerts given by a prestigious faculty and students, and Gilad sees its ideal growth as "steady but careful."

Events to look forward to in the new year range from a visit by Leningrad's fabled Kirov Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti (both at the Orange County Performing Arts Center) to an enticing new series at UC Irvine featuring contemporary composers and the perennially youthful 94-year-old music author Nicolas Slonimsky.

"Alexander Nevsky" is one of the stellar artistic collaborations of the 20th Century. When film director Sergei Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev teamed in 1937 to make a propaganda film about the fabled 13th-Century Russian warrior, Prince Alexander of Novgorod, the potential for a motion picture masterpiece was high. "The film is unique because it was made at the crossroads of these guys' lives," explained John Goberman, a New York-based television producer.

"I'm only now having first contact, and I must say I find the orchestra quite wonderful. Any conductor would be happy to work with such an orchestra on a regular basis." Lawrence Foster had just finished a morning rehearsal with the Pacific Symphony in its unusual work space, a converted 1920s-era Presbyterian church in downtown Santa Ana. (At one point, a police siren's wail came through the open stained-glass transom. "I was that bad?," Foster quipped.

Art students at San Diego's O'Farrell School for the Creative and Performing Arts recently gave the colonial Rip Van Winkle some California perspective. They had him snoozing under a palm tree. The pupils were designing the program cover for the school's production of "Rip Van Winkle," a new children's opera, according to Jack Montgomery, the opera production's stage director.

Audiences needn't be disturbed when they sit down for this weekend's San Diego Symphony Orchestra concert and see a harpsichord and only 22 musicians on stage. It is not an austerity measure. The orchestra's size has been reduced to accommodate the Bach Violin Concerto No. 2 in E Major. The shrunken symphony is in keeping with the number of musicians Bach had at his disposal. The orchestra also will play without a conductor in the concerts tonight through Sunday.

The 79th annual summer music series at the Hollywood Bowl, announced Thursday by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., kicks off with an opening night gala June 23 honoring composer John Williams--the first inductee into a newly created Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.

When the Philharmonic Society brought the Czech Philharmonic to Orange County eight years ago, the orchestra played Mahler. Monday night, the Czechs returned to Orange County. Again they played Mahler. But a lot has changed in eight years, both in Costa Mesa and in Prague. On our side of the equation, Costa Mesa now has an inviting concert hall, named after Renee and Henry Segerstrom. Last time around, the Orange County Performing Artscenter, as it now calls itself, had no such venue.