Rebel in Velvet

For most young people, classical music is a drag. Pianist Lorin Hollander, 24, thinks he knows why: "At a rock concert, the atmosphere is love. The rock groups talk their language. But at a classical concert, all they see is a guy in white tie and tails coming out very up tight on a platform. That's a plastic mannequin -- society's little machine running up there. If live concerts are going to survive, the artists themselves are going to have to change."

Hollander's chief concern these days is to get the hip audience out of the rock palaces and into the concert halls --at least long enough to hear him play.

For a recital at Manhattan's Lincoln Center last week, he took ads in several underground newspapers that read:

IF YOU'RE INTO CLASSICAL, HEAR SOME BEAUTIFUL STUFF. COME AS YOU ARE.

Sure enough, the kids came as they were -- in leather ponchos, chains, boots, olive-drab Army overcoats and lots of long hair. They ganged up at the box of fice just before concert time and gave Lincoln Center's Great Performers series its best one-day sale of the season.

Hollander returned the favor by coming pretty much as he was too -- blue velvet jacket, white silk shirt with ascot, bell-bottom trousers and long hair. To him, that kind of dress is no mere gimmick: "I feel hypocritical in tails, it's just not me."

Give and Take. There was no gimmickry in his playing either. Bach's Partita in E minor had real flesh and blood.

Ravel's Jeux d'eau and Debussy's Feux d'artifice rippled with pinks and light blues. Prokofiev's fiery Sonata No. 7 was dramatic and brutal when it had to be, gentle when that was called for. To Manhattan critics in the audience, it seemed that Hollander had never before bared his inner feelings quite so convincingly.

Upstairs in the $2.50 seats, the hippies led the cheering.

It was the kind of audience breakthrough that has marked most of Hollander's concert appearances in the past two years. At Brown University he walked onstage in a turtleneck, boots and tight slacks, then "rapped a bit," as he puts it, with the students. "We had a give and take, a sway over the footlights," he recalls. "They felt something, that I was one of them, that I was giving them no lies, that I was not one of the programmed society." Last year he spent a week with the experimental Living Arts Program in the Dayton, Ohio, public schools, teaching youngsters of different ages and talking to them about Viet Nam, rock, sex, pot, religion, race. To a group of music haters, he explained that Bach must have had a lot of sex to have 20 children. That kind of approach, says Hollander, at least jarred some of the kids out of their ennui. What is more, they usually stuck around to hear him play.

Hollander is a former child prodigy who was lucky enough to have made a graceful leap into manhood. His father was assistant concertmaster of the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini. At age four, Lorin was given a violin. He smashed it. At 41, he was started on piano lessons. A few years later, when his daily practice routine had risen from two hours to seven, he sometimes wished that he had smashed the piano too. "Other kids got up in the morning, ate, went off to play," he recalls. "For me, it was slavery. I never had a holiday until I was 22 years old."

The New Awareness. He has more leisure time now. By choice, Hollander limits himself to about 45 concert dates a year, plus a handful of recording sessions. With his wife Margot, a psychologist who teaches emotionally disturbed children, Hollander lives in a brick-walled flat five flights up in Greenwich Village. There is a hippie commune next door, and Hollander admits to sharing some of its ideals. He is in favor of "opening up," talks about "the new awareness" and believes that pot should be legalized. In a few weeks, he will give the first classical recital at Manhattan's leading rock palace, the Fillmore East.

Music remains Hollander's primary means of what he rather loftily calls "searching for meaning." Recently, he asked himself whether it was really his ambition to make a lot of money and keep his name in the papers. He decided that what he really wanted was to avoid being up tight ("Why should I be so wrought up that I pace the floor before a concert?"), have a satisfying marriage, spend time with friends, read philosophy and pursue the charmingly ingenuous notion that he is "alive, sensing, part of the universe." He says: "I could work myself into the grave with my music and the piano, not really learning what life is all about. And I think this is the crux of the change in young people today. They don't want material, they want experience." If music will help, Hollander will provide it.

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