June 4, 2008
USC is understandably proud of hosting the largest body of students from foreign countries of any institution in the country. Each visitor is afforded the opportunity to become acquainted with the second city of the United States by living and schooling in the center of L.A., but within close physical range are smaller enclaves, among them several communities once described by hostile observers as “suburbs in search of a city.” For huddled within the wide shadow of Los Angeles are Hollywood, Studio City, Culver City, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Westwood, Brentwood, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Venice, Van Nuys, San Fernando, Sylmar, Pasadena, flammable Malibu, Long Beach. All rich by cultural or industrial or material standards, but not to be overlooked in any purlieus of greater Los Angeles is the city of Glendale.
This, at an elevation of 2000 feet at its highest, has a population of around 100,000. It has a city hall, and a museum, and for a time hosted an annual mineral show in one of its public buildings. It also enjoys an old-time movie house, the Alex Theater, the name wisely shortened from Alexander, which was its moniker when it finished building in 1925. It enjoys ornate architecture left over from the splendor days of movie houses in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, a west coast edition of Boston’s Metropolitan Theater and New York’s Roxy and Radio City Music Hall, the latter still in business.
The Alex boasts a 100-foot high spire which lights up the façade of the theater; it is conveniently close to Jerry’s, an upscale deli; on Alex’s interior walls are exhibited posters of great film previews of the past, including some classy old movies directed by the eminent John Ford.
Recently I was invited to the world premiere, at the Alex, of a piano concerto by a young composer named Kevin Puts. It was played by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra with its director Jeffrey Kahan conducting from the piano. The following night it was performed at UCLA’s Royce Hall, but it of course could no longer be billed as a world premiere. LA Times music critic Mark Swed found “very nice things” in the concerto and had friendly things to say about a Handel concerto grosso which preceded and a Beethoven symphony which followed it.
There is something quaint about a concert in a less-than-starchy traditional musical environment. Shortly after the end of World War II, I happened upon an opera performed in the bomb-wrecked City of Wroclaw, Poland, which had formerly been Breslau, Germany. The opera was written by a local composer and it paled in comparison with stubbornly great performances in war-scarred big cities like Rome and Paris. But it was brave to perform at all in such circumstances, and the musicians of the hour and the countryside brought a different mien, a certain stoicism, to the audiences of half-wrecked concert halls.
So let`s hear it for performers who have worked inside the neglected grand opera house in Manaos on the Amazon, in London’s environs, Glendale, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. Each deserves to be sustained by visitors and homefolk alike.