Newsday from New York, New York • 75

1THEIL0SSI0F7A1LEGENDARYISTUDI0 1 59 A Heavy Blow to NYs Recording World serve up cool, crystalline, early French modernism in Debussys La Mer, mid bring it on home with the meat-and-po-tatoes, mittel Europa easentialism of Dvoraks Symphony No. 9 in minor, From The New World. Three Philharmonic music directors, past and present Zubin Mehta, Pierre Boulez and Kurt Masur participated in the gala, and the presence of yet another was evoked with the evenings curtain raiser, the Candide Overture, played without conductor, in honor of the lamented Bernstein. A noble gesture, this last Bernstein never wrote a better piece but the fact remains that this particular music really needs a conductor (or at least it did Monday night) to guide its fits and Btarts, shards and swoons. The Philharmonic got through the Overture all right things kept moving, there were no horrible mistakes but the performance sounded careful and constrained, two adjectives rarefy found in the same sentence with the name Leonard Bernstein.

UBIN MEHTA then took the stage to conduct Till Eulenspiegel, and if one can imagine a merrier interpretation than this one turned out to be, it would be hard to imagine a more dazzling and extroverted one. Every section of the orchestra got its moment to shine bassoons growled, tubas snorted, drums rattled, clarinets squealed and Mehta presided over the whole affair like a veteran, knowledgable, still enthusiastic tour guide heading into wild territory. This conductor was usually atjds best in big; not-quito-adult, romantic showpieces; he did not disappoint Monday night. Pierre Boulez, whose early 70s attempts to drag the recalcitrant Philharmonic into the 20th Century remain the stuff of -legend, summoned a vastly different sound for Debussys La Mer. If, during the Strauss, the collective playing sometimes reminded the listener of a classroom full of eager, aggressive children waiting to show off what theyve learned (Me! Me! Call on in the Debussy, all was immaculate clarity and order.

And yet, such is Boulez command of nuance in music that inspires him, he can impart more information to an orches- Please see PHILHARMONIC on Pbge 62 By Peter Goodman STAFF WRITER PS LOATING prominently in the back-I ground during the current PBS show I about the cast recording of Guys and I I Dolls is the logo of BMG, the studio where the Bhow was recorded. The logo makes a subtle plug for its parent company but that legendary studio is about to be destroyed, tearing a huge hole in the muscle of New Yorks music and film industries. In four months, Studio where the recording was made and Studios and some of the busiest and best recording spaces in New York will be tom down and turned into offices for the Internal Revenue Service, while the German company that owned the studios gets a city tax break to move to the brand-new budding it bought at a fire-sale price. Do we need to tear out an essential recording studio for another space for the IRS? asked recording and movie mogul David Gef-fen. Its just stupid, dumb and shortsighted.

The studios at 1133 Avenue of the Americas, led by RCA in 1967 and refurbished when media conglomerate Bertelsmann bought RCA from General Electric in 1986, have become even more heavily used in recent years. Besides such Broadway hits as Guys and Dolls," Crazy for You and La Cage aux Folles, the studios have been used to record the sound tracks for Disneys Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, Spike Lees Malcolm Rob Reiners When Harry Met Sally, Bernsteins Deutsche Grammophon recording of West Side Story, all of Stephen Sondheims shows, and performances by Kathleen Battle, Itzhak Perlman, Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick among many others. In the opinions of Geffen and a long list of record producers, conductors, engineers and film executives, the impending closure of the studios, which have a separate entrance on West 44th Street, will have a deadly effect on New Yorks music and film industries. Its a tragedy for the theater, for New York, Geffen said. It is a unique facility, the only one of its kind.

To lose it is irreparable. There is no replacement, and no one will build a replacement. It is a disaster that the place is closing down, said veteran producer Max Wilcox, who described Studio A as second in symphonic recording' quality only to Studio 1 in Londons famous Abbey Road complex. Closing BMG Studios, said Andy Hill, director of music production for Walt Disney Pictures, creates career problems fir hundreds of musicians, for a small but talented network of recording engineers, producers and arrangers as well as other studio employees, and consolidates even further the dominance of Los Angeles. The problem began last March when Bertelsmann, which owns the Bertelsmann Music Group (formerly RCA) and Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, purchased 1540 Broadway, two blocks from the current studio location, to consolidate its New York-based companies.

The firm paid $119 milium for the 2-year-old, 44-story structure, a steep drop from the $250 million mortgage on the building, which had been vacant Bince it opened. Bertelsmann got more than $10 million in city tax incentives, after it promised not to move about 500 jobs out of New York and keep all its work force (including the 50 BMG studio jobs) in the city for 15 years. Despite that job-keeping promise, shortly after the purchase was made public BMG announced it would dose the studios as of March 31, 1993, and not replace them in the new building. The move stunned the music industry, which has depended cm the former RCA studios for years. I thought it was a joke the first time I heard it," said conductor Paul Gemignani, who has recorded Crazy for You and all of Sondheims shows at Studio A.

Anybody who makes a recording in this town who is not a rocker, the first number they call is Studio A The studios currently employ about 50 engineers and technicians, about half of whom are Please see STUDIOS on Page 62 lent use of Borregos dark, expressive features and lithe, compact frame. He belongs in the great roles, said Akalaitis, who has directed Borrego in Leon and Lena, an adapation of Buchner, and The Screens at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, as well as in Green Card at Los Angeles Mark Taper Forum. He is not afraid to go to those emotions that are painful. Woyzeck tells in a fragmentary way the text fills only 22 pages the story of a common man, a soldier, who, driven by obsessive jealousy, brutally murders his wife. With its depiction of class conflict and the interior life of an ordinary man, the play is considered one of the first modem dramas, and Borrego believes that the tale of Woyzecks deterioration into violence is still relevant for modem audiences.

He sees it all go against him his superiors, his work. And all the outside stimuli gets warped, Borrego said as he sat in a drafty hallway at the Public Theater, devouring an apple. Whidi is what I think happens to people who commit violent crime: The outside stimuli gks all screwed up. ORREGO, WHO grew up in a musical family his father, Jesse is a professional accordionist in San OV Antonio soys that despite his grounding in televi-1 sion, he feels at home Off-Broadway. In TV and movies, hes usually offered roles that amount to Latino stereotypes I did two Miami Vices playing Colombian drug dealers, he said while on stage, hes done everything from Tis Pity Shes a Whore to Hamlet Immediately after leaving Fame, Borregos future was sealed.

He was cast in the Akalaitis production at the Mark aper. Some people do dinner theater after television. The first thing I did was an ensemble, avant-garde piece, Borrego said. When I did it, I thought yeah, this is where Im from. This is it ba-fcii'i'i'c'sn tis rvif The recording of Guys and DoHs in MG Studio with Peter Gallagher, Josie de Guzman, Nathan Lane and Lppy-udpoer Faith Priima -JU B.

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