Seeking a Mark

Like some Michelangelo who carves peach pits, or a Shakespeare whose medium is the haiku, Harmonica Virtuoso Larry Adler has found that there are grave drawbacks to being the best of a rare breed. His tongue-twisting technique and feathery phrasing have dazzled concert audiences for more than a quarter-century; but purists still dismiss his performances of classical music as gimmickry, akin to playing horn concertos on a length of garden hose. Now and then, such composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Darius Milhaud have written pieces for him, but the repertory for harmonica remains woefully thin; most of Adler's concert selections must be adapted from music for other instruments.

Reedy Skittering. That is only one of the handicaps Adler has faced over the years. In 1949, after he was accused of being a Communist sympathizer, he went into professional exile from the U.S., making London his concert, TV and recording base as well as his home.* Except for a year-long sojourn in 1959, he has returned only for occasional engagements since.

Now his prospects in the U.S. are brightening again. RCA Victor has signed him to a new contract, and plans to record four concertos that were created for him, plus rarely heard pieces by Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. Recently, Conductor Andre Kostelanetz featured Adler in the New York Philharmonic's informal "Promenades" series at Manhattan's Lincoln Center-his first appearance with the Philharmonic in more than 20 years. His performances of Rumanian Fantasy for Harmonica and Orchestra, written for him in 1956 by Rumanian-born Composer Francis Chagrin, were worth the wait. As his hands fluttered and curved expressively around the instrument, his reedy, plangent tone skittered through Chagrin's melodic score like something sprung from the wedding of an oboe with a gypsy fiddle. Last week Adler made one of his rare TV appearances, playing his beguiling transcription of the gavotte from Bach's Partita No. 3 for unaccompanied violin on the Mike Douglas Show. And while the taped program was being shown around the U.S., he was already in Israel, entertaining the troops.

After Genevieve. In spite of all this, the 53-year-old Adler has begun to brood that "what I know is likely to die with me." He has started the tricky task of giving formal lessons on a technique that he himself worked out by instinct; meantime, he is turning increasingly to an activity that offers a better chance of enduring fame--composing. Although in his earlier career he boasted that he could neither read nor write music, he eventually learned, and even studied composition with Ernst Toch for a year. In 1953, he got the chance to do the score for the British comedy film Genevieve; his music won an Academy Award nomination, and led to writing and playing assignments for another 15 movies (recently King and Country, A High Wind in Jamaica).

His latest project--the score for a forthcoming TV musical commissioned by the BBC--is a crucial test, since it is his first major work not built around his harmonica playing. In his own mind he apparently passes the test, for he is now seeking Thornton Wilder's approval for a musical version of The Skin of Our Teeth. "At the moment, I feel I'm a kind of footnote in musical history," Adler explains. "I've put something into concert music that wasn't there before. But if I could make a real mark as a composer, it would give me more satisfaction than playing."

* The charge was most dramatically made by Mrs. John T. McCullough, then a resident of Greenwich, Conn., who objected to a local appearance by Adler and Dancer Paul Draper on the ground that their appearances at certain political rallies showed they were "proCommunist" in sympathy. Adler and Draper countered with a widely publicized libel suit that ended in a hung jury.

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