Music: Transfusion

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Less shouted about than Los Angeles' famed Hollywood Bowl summer concerts are the regular winter programs of Los Angeles' 20-year-old Philharmonic Orchestra. Golden Age of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was between 1919 and 1933, when the late copper tycoon William Andrews Clark Jr. lost $250,000 a year on it. When the cornucopia stopped flowing at Clark's death five years ago, a group of conservative Los Angeles socialites managed to keep his orchestra alive, but gave it less lavish rations. Proud were they of getting as permanent conductor world-famed Otto Klemperer. While the plump palms of Los Angeles' highty-tighty delighted to honor the Los Angeles Orchestra, neighbors from Hollywood's film colony stayed away in droves, and nobody was sorry.

Then the picture changed. This fall Conductor Klemperer was rushed off to Boston to be operated on for a brain tumor. By this month his health had become so precarious that he had to give up his conducting plans for the season. With the health of their orchestra also precarious, the board of directors decided on a desperate blood transfusion: an injection of high-spending cultural barbarians among their own withering shirt fronts. Last week, while the starchier board members still creaked and grumbled, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced: 1) a move from Los Angeles' solemn, downtown Philharmonic Auditorium to Hollywood's garish Pantages Cinema Theatre, 2) three new conductors: famed German exile Bruno Walter, jovial Russo-Britisher Albert Coates, glamorous platinum blond Leopold Stokowski.