If a defense attorney, a prosecutor and a judge were to walk into a music hall what would be the first thing they�d do?
�Spend a half-hour arguing legal motions,� veteran Los Angeles lawyer David Waller says one of his colleagues told him when he learned Waller would be toting his cello to a rehearsal of the fledgling Los Angeles Lawyers Philharmonic Orchestra.
The orchestra had just two hours to run through Johannes Brahms� �Hungarian Dance No. 5,� Edvard Grieg�s �Triumphal March� and a rousing John Philip Sousa number, followed by a couple more classical and pops pieces.
In just a few days the group�s 60-plus members would be decked out in black tie, playing their biggest gig to date � the grand opening of the Los Angeles County Bar Association�s new downtown office. Not that anyone in the ensemble of brass, woodwind, string and percussion sections seemed to be showing any nervousness.
�We�re not just a bunch of lawyers playing music. We�re actually a good orchestra,� maestro Gary S. Greene, who organized the ensemble earlier this year, said confidently before putting his players through their paces.
Greene, a litigation attorney, didn�t threaten to sue anyone who intruded on anyone else�s solo. But he did bring his baton down quickly whenever various musicians wandered off to the beat of their own drummer during the rehearsal at Wilshire United Methodist Church, a cavernous but acoustically stunning old cathedral in a particularly tony section of Los Angeles� west side.
The orchestra hit its stride this month at a Christmas-week holiday concert in which it performed a mixture of classical and pops pieces. At the end of the two-hour performance emceed by actress June Lockhart, a longtime friend of Greene�s, the audience of more than 300 rose to give a standing ovation.
But unlike those ensembles, which either augment their ranks with non-lawyers or are led by a professional musician, the LA group recruits only attorneys and is under the baton of Greene, who in his spare time is also concertmaster for the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic.
�It�s the only environment where lawyers are making harmony as opposed to dissonance,� she joked.