Music: Debut in the Bowl

Almost everything went wrong at the Hollywood Bowl. Soprano Dorothy Maynor, the guest star, canceled her engagement because her mother had just died. A substitute chorus was ill-prepared, and a pinch-hitting baritone had to fall back on 01′ Man River. So the U.S. debut last week of a talented Negro conductor, Rudolph Dunbar, 39, was a grim experience for everyone but him. Critics praised his crisp, authoritative conducting of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra.

Dunbar says he resolved to lead a U.S. symphony orchestra when he was a boy in British Guiana, the great-grandson of a slave. Says he: “I knew I would. I believe I am psychic. . . .”

At nine, he was apprenticed to a British militia band in Guiana, hardly saw his parents again until he left the country in his early teens to study at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Then he went abroad, studied under Felix Weingartner in Vienna, nearly starved for five years until he got a job in England as a music critic.

No Whistling. World War II gave him his chance. In April, 1942, amid the wreckage of the blitz, he conducted the London Philharmonic to a full house in Royal Albert Hall, to raise funds for Britain’s colored allies.

Later Dunbar signed on as a war correspondent for the American Associated Negro Press, went ashore at Normandy with a Negro field artillery battalion, was the first foreigner to conduct a symphony orchestra in Paris after the liberation.

Last fall, when he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Berlin, the best critics in the house—the orchestra members—cheered him. Glowed Dunbar: “They’re wonderful. Boy, I could drink five gallons of beer!” Some in the audience, accustomed to Brahms and Wagner, found the cacophony of William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony a little hard to take. So did some in the audience at Hollywood Bowl last week. But they were impressed by the conservative and competent way he handled Weber’s tried & true overture to Oberon, Aaron Copland’s El Salon Mexico.

Recently the British Guianan Government voted Dunbar £5,000 for his “contributions to the Empire.” One of the distractions at Dunbar’s U.S. debut as conductor of a major symphony orchestra was the whirr of British newsreel cameras. Says Dunbar: “They want to show those films through the colonies and say ‘Look what we have done for Dunbar’—but it is not the British who have done it for me, it is the Americans.” But Empire Subject Dunbar is not sure he likes living in the U.S. Says he: “I think I will make my home in Paris where, if you are good, they will applaud you whether you are pink, white or black, and if you are bad they will whistle at you.”