A Roof in Los Angeles

In Los Angeles' West Hollywood Auditorium one night last week, there was enough long hair to string a gross of fiddles.* About 600 of the local intelligentsia--artists, music students and professionals--turned up to hear a dozen or so musicians play a program of choice chamber music. It would have been quite all right with the musicians if no listeners had turned up at all. For the concerts called "Evenings on the Roof" (now in their 14th season) are "for the pleasure of the performers, and will be played regardless of audience."

Last week's program started off with Trio for flute, viola and cello by 20th Century French Composer Albert Roussel, continued with a Bach sonata for the solo flute, and finished with English Composer William Walton's Facade, scored for seven instruments and a poetry reciter (Actress Jane Wyatt reading Edith Sitwell). The program noted with pride that Facade (composed in 1922) was getting its Los Angeles premiere.

Evenings on the Roof started on a real roof. It was the idea of a critic named Peter Yates and his wife, Concert Pianist Frances Mullen. The Yateses, who like chamber music, began inviting musician friends to their hilltop studio, to play strictly for fun. Word spread, musicians brought other musicians, and the Yateses soon had a full-fledged musicale on their hands. Nowadays, Evenings on the Roof is run by the musicians themselves. Ticket sales (average admission: 60-c-) cover expenses, and the musicians, many of them drawn from the Los Angeles Symphony and from Hollywood studio orchestras, play for nothing. They pick their program to please themselves, generally achieve a good balance between moderns (including Southern California composers now & then) and the old masters.

The musicians try to schedule at least one Los Angeles "first" for every concert. This sometimes leads them into fairly deep musical waters (e.g., unfamiliar works by Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Anton von Webern). They do not give a hoot for the critics. The Roof's printed programs run a back-page column of critical comments, listed under two headings, "Figs" and "Thistles." Sample thistles on the back page last week: "Dull Roof Concert Dredges Up Bores" (Los Angeles Times); "Within the seven minutes it takes to perform, [a quartet by Webern] is spare, economical, terse and austere, and seven minutes too long" (Los Angeles Daily News). But most of the time, the critics throw figs.

* For news of another Hollywood gathering, see RELIGION.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.