Music: Baton Week

It looked like a relay race, the way conductors were passing each other their batons last week:

Bruno Walter took over the job that Artur Rodzinski no longer wanted. At 70, Walter became the one-year “musical adviser” of New York’s Philharmonic-Symiphony—a job he had turned down four years ago “because of my age.”

Obviously the Philharmonic would use Walter’s year shopping for a permanent conductor. Next year’s guest conductors were the apparent favorites in the race: Minneapolis’ Dimitri Mitropoulos, Cleveland’s George Szell, Paris’ Charles Munch and Hollywood Bowl’s Leopold Stokowski. All but Stokowski (who once was) are clients of music’s Mr. Big, Arthur Judson, the Philharmonic’s manager. Judson thus had a firmer hold on the throne than before Rodzinski abdicated (TIME, Feb. 17).

Conductor Walter, one of the half-dozen greatest by anybody’s ranking, was a pre-Hitler conductor of the Vienna Staatsoper. His strength is also his weakness: he does best by the Central Europeans—Brahms, Mozart, Mahler, Bruckner, et al.—but plays little else.

Leonard Bernstein, brilliant, brash young (28) man of U.S. music, triumphed in a ticklish test. In Manhattan he led Dr. Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra through a short but arduous young man’s program: Symphony No. 7 in C Major (which Schubert wrote at 31), Le Sacre du Printemps, which Stravinsky wrote at 30. It was the first time that 72-year-old Serge Koussevitzky had ever let a guest conduct his Boston Orchestra for a whole concert in New York. Carnegie Hall was so packed that even Pianist Jose Iturbi had to stand.

Koussevitzky leaned over the railing of Box No. 55, beaming like a polished apple, while his prize protege took four bows. Said Lenny Bernstein (whom Koussevitzky calls Lenyushka): “It was pretty awe-inspiring.”