A musical treasure

I just wanted to give thanks and congratulations to The Times and David Mermelstein for the excellent article on James Conlon and entartete Musik [“Saving a Music’s Place,” Oct. 17].

Maestro Conlon himself is a cultural treasure, and the city of Los Angeles is very lucky to have him.

As to Conlon’s wonderful Zemlinsky Project, the conductor deserves the highest praise. Mermelstein calls Zemlinsky’s music, “resolutely Old World” and “lushly attractive”; still, while this description is correct, it obscures half the story.

As Conlon “regards the Nazi era as ‘a rupture in a great discourse,’ ” he neglects the even greater rupture that occurred roughly 20 years prior -- the First World War. This is where the division of Zemlinsky’s oeuvre occurred -- between the “Old World” style of the late-Romanticist works of 1895-1913 and the Modernistic “Jazz Age” style of 1915-1936.

Tully Atkinson

Laguna Niguel