Music: Boston Picks a Woman

A woman playing first flute in the Boston Symphony? “A very serious matter,” wrote Critic Rudolph Elie in the Herald, “and I am not a little dismayed by it.” But there she was, when the orchestra opened its season last week, her flute tones firm, pure and accurate.

Perky, dimpled Doriot Anthony, 30, knows as well as anybody that the major orchestras eye female instrumentalists with suspicion (unless they play the harp†). She has held such positions as second flute in Washington’s National Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, first flute in the NBC Standard (Los Angeles) and Hollywood Bowl Symphonies.

She had no particular hope when she heard last summer that “one of my gods,” veteran First Flutist Georges Laurent of the Boston Symphony, was retiring. But she had experience and solid training (at Rochester’s Eastman School), and she applied for the position anyway. In July she traveled to Tanglewood for an audition with Conductor Charles Munch. She played him some Bach, waited while other applicants took their turns, then went back twice more to show what she could do with Debussy and Ravel. Munch took two months to decide. It was not until fortnight ago that a phone call came through from Boston: she could be first flutist, on a year’s trial.

At the opening concert, Conductor Munch nodded approvingly over her solo bits in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. The Boston Globe critic was even more approving; he pronounced her “a true find.” Scowled the Herald’s Elie: “I find it difficult to accept the notion that any lady flute player could ever succeed Georges Laurent either as an artist or as an object of such veneration among men.”

† The Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra have women harpists. (Philadelphia also has a woman second cellist.) Further west women have gained a bit more foothold. e.g., Indianapolis and Houston have women first flutists, St. Louis has a woman first trombonist.