CLASSICAL MUSIC CONCERTS BECOMING BIG MAC ATTACKS.

Byline: Bernard Holland The New York Times

I haven't gone to see the movie ``Shine,'' and I probably won't. The idea of losing one's mind over the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto is simply too offensive.

The story is Australian and purportedly true: a child prodigy is hounded into mental illness and eventually emerges whole. Psychiatrists, welcome to ``Shine'': Enjoy the bona fide melodrama. Rejoicers in the human spirit: Let ``Shine'' give you heart.

But music lovers: How can you get excited about a cozy piece of schlock like this? If you want to accuse David Helfgott's father of child abuse, fine. I accuse him of bad taste.

Mankind has shed much blood, psychic and otherwise, in the name of great goals and shining ideals. Yet doesn't the value of any sacrifice depend on the object of one's martyrdom?

I suspect that the characters of ``Shine'' have gone to an awful lot of trouble over something not worth the effort. Marvelous were the Spartans defending Athens at Thermopylae, but the thought of Leonidas fighting to the death in front of Burger King headquarters sort of ruins the effect.

``Rach 3'' is a nice little piece, made to order for virtuosos on the make. The winner of the 1993 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth played it in the finals. Indeed, five of the six finalists chose Rachmaninoff to show themselves off. What a horrifying evening it was.

``Rach 3'' is a winner's piece, you must admit. The weepy tunes strum the heartstrings. Its terribly complicated problems are calculated to be noticed by even the sleepiest of listeners (or judges).

The music does not waste its time on orchestration, which is here so anonymous that the pianistic business being transacted is guaranteed to go on undistracted. In the hands of a Yevgeny Kissin or a young Van Cliburn, ``Rach 3'' rises above itself. Mostly, it is about audiences, not music.

There is no need to get angry at ``Shine,'' but as far as musical values go, it sells itself short. ``Shine'' has plenty of company in this regard.

Indeed, the music world in general is quickly learning how to take low standards of creativity and devise a whole new body of ``high art'' from them. It is already expert at embalming great men for perpetual viewing. How else to entice a listenership that has turned coy?

Audiences seem more comfortable than ever biting into the Big Macs of the classical repertory, so put that fancy food aside and give them what they want. More important, make them think that it's haute cuisine.

The Philadelphia Orchestra, as my colleague Anthony Tommasini pointed out in a recent review, showed just what it had been fighting for in its long, costly and bitter strike this fall. It did so with a Carnegie Hall program featuring the most famous of Verdi's overtures, almost the most famous of Beethoven's symphonies and an innocuously agreeable Saint-Saens violin concerto. There is a slight smell of something dead in programs like this.

The Czech Philharmonic appeared several weeks ago with the two fundamental cliches of Central European Romanticism, music from ``Ma Vlast'' by Smetana and the ``New World'' Symphony by Dvorak.

What a boon for the music business the 100th anniversary of Brahms' death has been: a legitimate opportunity to give audiences what they already know, and make it look prestigious.

The New York Philharmonic is challenging our sense of adventure this holiday season with ``Pictures at an Exhibition'' in a non-Ravel orchestration. (Now, that is an exciting wrinkle.)

Most major orchestras are paying lip service to recent ideas of thematic programming, but they usually settle for evenings that begin with an ``excuse me for what I am about to do'' and end with an apology for it.

Programmers at the New York Philharmonic, along with their guest conductor Zdenek Macal, were evidently so terrified at presenting a Roy Harris symphony earlier in the season that they sought forgiveness by tacking on the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, great music which none of us needs to hear again for quite some time to come. Eat a little of your risotto, the thinking goes, and I'll take you to Wendy's for dessert.

Perhaps the most egregious example of the ``Shine'' syndrome comes from the Boston Symphony, proud commissioners of Stravinsky's ``Symphony of Psalms,'' Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and a score of other 20th-century masterpieces.

At great expense, the orchestra piled into its buses and airplanes a few weeks ago to bring a breathlessly expectant Carnegie Hall audience a program of ``Rach 2'' (for a description of ``Rach 2,'' see ``Rach 3'') and music from Tchaikovsky's ``Nutcracker.''

The first was certainly designed to get Christmas shoppers off their feet and in a nice mood. The second, one can only hope, set listeners' toes to tapping.

Labor unrest is everywhere in classical music. Noble rallying cries for survival ring through dressing rooms across the land. Striking musicians, or musicians threatening to strike, cry out that they are artists and that their ability to make art is under attack. Managers say they are fighting uprightly to preserve their institutions.

Are ``Rach 3'' and its ilk the art musicians are fighting for? And why should America's most prestigious orchestras survive at all if their function is the weekly ritual of exhuming and reburying an exhausted music tradition?

Also ask yourself this: What if a restaurant like Le Perigord became a fast-food franchise? Would you care if it folded?