VIOLINIST WITH A VISION

Joseph Swensen is not an easily daunted musician. “I want to try to change the atmosphere of the place with the music, not change the music to fit the place,” says the 27-year-old violinist, who will make his Hollywood Bowl debut Thursday with Brahms’ Concerto.

Swensen says he is very excited about the possibility of playing for so many people at one time. Indeed, he stressed the issue of excitement, and the challenge of communicating it musically, in a recent phone conversation.

“If I have any crusade at all, it’s to try and help us all remember how it was the first time we sat in an orchestra, or heard a symphony for the first time.”

The first time for Swensen was quite a while ago, despite his relative youth. He began studying the violin when he was 5, and first played the Brahms Concerto publicly when he was 16. When he was 13, he won competitions at Aspen, and in his hometown at Juilliard, where he studied with Dorothy DeLay.

(Swensen is also highly gifted in another sense: He performs on an instrument formerly played by the great Spanish virtuoso, Pablo de Sarasate, which is on indefinite loan to him from an anonymous private collector.)

The violinist has noted a real change in the way he is regarded as he has aged: “I’m very happy for it. I was so frustrated about being considered some sort of strange phenom . . . not taken seriously as a musician.” The fact that more is expected now than just precocious fingers “inspires me tremendously.”

Swensen has never worked with Edo de Waart, who will be leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Bowl this week; he is familiar with the orchestra, however. Performing the Sibelius Concerto with Paavo Berglund and the Philharmonic in January, 1986, was “one of the most rewarding experiences I have had,” he said.

An interesting collaboration between Swensen and Philharmonic music director Andre Previn is in the works. The pair have made a recording of the Beethoven Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic, due out in February on RCA. Beethoven supplied his own piano transcription of the Concerto with striking, extended cadenzas, including the tympani interjections that many critics have supposed were original in Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke’s controversial cadenzas. Swensen has transcribed those Beethoven piano cadenzas, which he claims “shed an entirely new light on the piece,” for his own instrument.

MICKEY MOUSE AND MORE AT HOLLYWOOD BOWL: On the same program with Swensen, the Philharmonic makes a rare, predictably brief, summer gesture toward modernity with American minimalist John Adams’ “Fanfare, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine.” Adams--probably not coincidentally--was composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony during De Waart’s tenure there as music director. The remainder of the program consists of Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C.

On Tuesday, comes Brahms’ First Piano Concerto, courtesy of Krystian Zimerman, who also offers a solo recital Wednesday. Paired with the Brahms Concerto Tuesday is Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” De Waart conducting.

The week ends with a “Disney Spectacular” Friday and Saturday. Disney executive Michael D. Eisner hosts the Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, led by David Alan Miller, plus Richard and Robert Sherman singing songs from their “Mary Poppins” score, dancers Rebecca Wright and George de la Pena in a “Snow White Ballet,” and the original Mouseketeers.

BOLSHOI: THE FINAL WEEK: Five performances of “Giselle”--Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, plus a Saturday matinee--are the highlights of the Bolshoi Ballet’s final week at the Music Center on its current tour. Other productions this week are “Raymonda” Tuesday night, a highlights mixed-bill on a Wednesday matinee, and a final look at Irek Mukhamedov in “The Golden Age” at a matinee next Sunday.

GLASNOST OR NOT: THE CASE OF THE MISSING COVER BOY: One of the biggest extra-artistic questions about the Bolshoi’s tour concerns Gedeminas Taranda, the dancer so strikingly depicted on the posters for the tour and on both covers of the souvenir program book, and so conspicuously absent from the stage. Bolshoi officials seem to have declared the issue a non-story, explaining that Taranda is not here--because he is not here. The new “openness” apparently has not come to Soviet ballet .

BOWL TOO: The 64th season of the Summer Music Festival at the Redlands Bowl ends this week. Tenor Eduardo Villa, a UC Santa Barbara and USC alum, will sing operatic repertory Friday in a program entitled “From Vienna With Love.” Frank Fetta leads the Festival Symphony in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and other works on the Viennese theme.

On Tuesday, Dr. Yip Wai Hong’s Children’s Choir from Hong Kong performs, following an appearance at the Chinese Moon Festival Gala at the Orange County Performing Arts Center yesterday.

PEOPLE: Karin Averty of Paris Opera Ballet has joined San Francisco Ballet as a principal dancer beginning next season. Averty was a gold medalist at the 1980 Varna competition.

American Ballet Theatre dancer Elaine Kudo must have enjoyed herself when she served as Mikhail Baryshnikov’s partner in Twyla Tharp’s “Sinatra Suite,” seen here during ABT’s 1984 engagement. Kudo has left Ballet Theatre and joined Tharp’s company.

In December, Sid Caesar will make his Metropolitan Opera debut in the speaking role of the jailer Frosch in “Die Fledermaus.”

Bay Area-based musician Jung-Ho Pak has been named winner of the Young Musicians Foundation conducting competition, and will lead the YMF Orchestra at four concerts next season, in addition to assisting music director Lalo Schifrin.

David Shifrin, principal clarinetist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, has been awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant of $10,000.

Marc Shulgold, who wrote this column frequently in the past 12 years, has left The Times to write music and dance criticism for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colo.