Music: Blazing Hit

“We had better luck than Nixon,” said Conductor Leonard Bernstein, “but then he’s in a different line of business. All we did was play music.” The New York Philharmonic was completing a 38-concert, twelve-country tour of Latin America that lit a fire of good will from one end of the continent to the other. Back home this week. Conductors Bernstein and Dimitri Mitropoulos and the 107 members of the orchestra were to be hailed at New York’s city hall for a job superbly done.

Bernstein had started out with a few doubts: “I was worried because a strange conductor always has more pull with the orchestra, and I was just the boy next door they’d known for years.” But Lennie and the orchestra hit it off. With programs of Haydn, Brahms and Beethoven, larded with easily digestible Ravel and Gershwin and spiced with occasional contemporary works, the tour was a hit from the start.

City after city hoisted Bienvenida Filarmónica street banners. Seats to the concerts were in such short supply that they were hawked for as much as $30 apiece. Whatever the program, audience and critics were invariably breathless at the Philharmonic’s high professional gloss. Wrote a Santiago critic: “The orchestral interpretation is simply marvelous, with a perfection to which Chile has never been exposed.” Said a rapt Rio critic: “We never heard such beauty before.”

The orchestra suffered its share of mishaps, beginning when its trunks were rain-soaked in Panama (TIME, May 12). It hit Guayaquil, Ecuador at a time when the streets were noisome as a result of a six-week garbage strike. In La Paz some of the players got high-altitude sickness, and in Santiago they played in an open sports arena with 30 electric heaters strategically spotted about the stage. But in Lima, days after a crowd had tried to break up the Nixon tour, the orchestra got an ovation when it played The Star-Spangled Banner.

When he completed his final concert, even indefatigable Conductor Bernstein was exhausted. Standing wrapped in Serge Koussevitzky’s old black velvet opera cloak at the Rio airport, he signed a last round of autographs. “It’s over now,” he said limply. “It’ll cost the U.S. Government about $250,000, less than one jet. But millions of people heard an American orchestra and liked it.”