August 9, 1991

The Will-Burt Company, a parts maker in Orrville, Ohio, senses the beginnings of an economic recovery. Various customers -- a nearby Volvo truck factory, for example, and AMF Bowling Inc. -- are purchasing a few more fenders, doors, bumpers and finely machined parts. As the pace picks up, Harry E. Featherstone, Will-Burt's chief executive, finds himself with a week's supply of steel. But he wishes the stockpile were smaller. "I'd like to order steel daily," he said. Such thinking helps to explain why the heralded recovery from the recession is having trouble getting off the ground. Much depends on whether Mr. Featherstone and thousands of other American executives conclude, more or less simultaneously, that sales are again brisk enough and sustained enough to warrant restocking. When they do, economists say, the jump in production needed to satisfy the surge in new orders will give the economy a kick out of recession. Not This Month

The agreement announced by California regulators Wednesday to sell most of the Executive Life Insurance Company's junk bond portfolio for $2.7 billion in cash appears to be fair, analysts said today, and one regulators should be happy to get. "If I were the regulators, I would look at this deal very closely before I passed it up," said Kenneth H. Thomas, a junk bond analyst in Miami. But that does not mean another bidder will not come forward.

THE beginning of David Del Tredici's "Alice Symphony" hardly seemed a beginning at all. At the work's world premiere here, at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music on Wednesday night, the oboe sounded an A and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra began to join in, one section at a time, as in an ordinary pre-performance tuning. It was only when Oliver Knussen conducted a gradual fading of the sound that the audience realized it had been slyly inducted into the work itself. Then the soprano, Phyllis Bryn-Julson -- who has been a stunning performer of the composer's works -- began to recite an excerpt from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." It wasn't like falling down a rabbit hole, but this virtuosic performance by the singer and student players did pull us into an evocative and intoxicating musical universe, born of Mr. Del Tredici's now epic obsession with Alice. The other works on the program -- Carolyn Yarnell's "Enemy Moon" and "Exit" (1990-91) and Andrew Imbrie's Symphony No. 1 (1966) -- though skillfully executed, paled in comparison.

Doctors' ownership of laboratories, diagnostic imaging centers and physical therapy clinics tends to increase the use and cost of such services without improving access to care for poor people or residents of rural areas, a Florida state agency reported today. A study done by the agency also found that more than 45 percent of the doctors practicing in Florida, 8,500 of 18,250 doctors, have invested in joint ventures to which they can refer patients.

In 1847, Daniel Massey left New York State for Newcastle, Ontario, where he created the small farm implement company that became Massey-Ferguson Ltd., one of Canada's industrial giants. Now the company, which changed its name five years ago to the Varity Corporation, has won Government and stockholder approval to move to the United States. It has incorporated itself in Delaware and is moving its corporate headquarters from Toronto to Buffalo.