Music: Purged Philharmonic

The new boss of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony last week made a good start at his new job. This was a great relief to all concerned with the oldest U.S. orchestra. Arturo Toscanini’s resignation, in 1936, had left the Philharmonic as limp as a discarded ventriloquist’s dummy. His successors, British-born John Barbirolli and a string of guest conductors, had failed really to strike up the band. But when 49-year-old, grey-thatched Artur Rodzinski left the podium last week, the audience had heard some pretty musicianly music and even the skeptics were hopeful.

The hopes were based on several things. Boss Rodzinski had demanded, and got, absolute powers over the Philharmonic’s artistic policies and personnel, free from all board-of-directors interference. Boss Rodzinski was also a conductor of long experience, particularly famed among musicians as an orchestra builder and repairer. He had, in 1933, developed the bush-league Cleveland Orchestra into one of the Middle West’s two finest (the other: the Chicago Symphony). He had been picked by Arturo Toscanini in 1937 to organize and train the NBC Symphony. Last spring Rodzinski got ready for his New York job by suddenly firing or pensioning 17 of the Philharmonic’s most important musicians (including Concertmaster Mishel Piastre and practically every soloist in the brass and reed sections). It was obvious that the orchestra was in for a complete overhaul.

What the 2,500-odd listeners heard in Carnegie Hall last week was, in effect, a new ensemble. Actually only a little over 10% of the personnel had been changed. But that 10% were mostly first-desk men, whose musical and psychological effect on an orchestra is crucial. The Philharmonic had a new concertmaster, a new solo viola, a new first oboe and bassoon, two new first horns, a new trombone, a new tuba. The orchestra played with a precision and energy that led many to hope that it might soon resume its historic place as a real rival of the Boston and Philadelphia orchestras.

Artur Rodzinski has had a sketchily schooled career. The son of a Polish army surgeon, he was born in Spalato on the coast of Dalmatia. When he was still a child, his family moved to Lwow, Poland, where he took a few piano lessons and got a job as head of the claque at the Opera House. But his father had cut out a soberer career than music for his son—Artur studied law at the University of Lwow.

World War I interrupted this by mustering him as an Austrian soldier. Severely wounded by shrapnel, he resumed his law studies in Vienna, took his doctor’s degree by which he is sometimes addressed today but which has no connection with music. Then revolution blasted eastern Europe. Rodzinski went to the Ukraine as an Austrian agent in charge of food imports. Returning stability found him back in Lwow, as a price fixer on eggs, meat and vegetables. In the evenings he played the piano in a honkytonk.

This led to more piano pounding as a backstage accompanist to Lwow’s opera singers. Rodzinski began taking avid notes on what opera conductors did in rehearsals. But when he was given chances to conduct Ernani and Carmen he produced terrific fiascos. For some reason Rodzinski has always shone to better advantage in unfamiliar music than in the classics. This trait appeared in Lwow when he was put in charge of the premiere of a Polish opera called Eros and Psyche. The result got him a job at the Warsaw Opera. There in 1925 Leopold Stokowski met him and offered him an assistant conductorship in Philadelphia.

Intelligence, audacity, a strong personality and a fine if not a surpassing conductorial talent have taken Artur Rodzinski the rest of the way. In Cleveland he made some of the biggest headlines in U.S. music. Using the splendid theatrical facilities of Severance Hall, he produced some of the finest opera the Middle West had ever heard. From Russia, in 1935, he imported Dmitri Shostakovich’s celebrated Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, made a Cleveland and Manhattan sensation with it.

Today Rodzinski lives with his handsome, golden-haired Polish wife on a large estate near Stockbridge, Mass. He tackles vegetable gardening and beekeeping with a fanatic concentration which is already becoming familiar to the members of the Philharmonic. Says he: “I wouldn’t give in to the extent of one inch in matters of musical perfection. The challenge of my life and the ambition of my life is to put the Philharmonic where it belongs—on top.”

Some 200 other U.S. orchestras last week dug into their scores for the winter season. The widely acknowledged finest of them all, Sergei Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony, began the conductor’s 20th year by playing a dignified Ode specially composed by his good friend Igor Stravinsky in memory of Madame Koussevitzky, who died nearly two years ago. Said visiting Music Critic Virgil Thomson, an all-out admirer of Stravinsky’s recent neoclassicism: “The work as a whole is restrained, comely without ostentation and daintily noble, as befits the funeral monument of a lady who was not in her own right a public character.” Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra, runner-up to the Bostonians, began its concerts in the dowdy, acoustically perfect Academy of Music. In Manhattan’s Radio City, the NBC Symphony (ranking as one of the four finest with the Boston, Philadelphia and Philharmonic) got ready to be shunted between Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski.

The most promising of the remaining U.S. orchestras as the season opened were: the Chicago (Belgian-born Désiré De-fauw succeeded the late Frederick Stock) ; Cleveland (Austrian-born Erich Leinsdorf, formerly of the Metropolitan Opera House, succeeded the Philharmonic’s Rodzinski); Minneapolis (Dimitri Mitropoulos) ; San Francisco (Pierre Monteux) ; Cincinnati (Eugene Goossens); St. Louis (Vladimir Golschmann); Detroit (U.S.-born Karl Krueger had managed to pull things together again after the orchestra became the temporary charge of Sam’s Cut-Rate, Inc.—TIME, Oct. 19); Los Angeles (U.S.-born Alfred Wallenstein succeeded a string of guests); National Symphony of Washington, D.C. (Hans Kindler); Pittsburgh (Fritz Reiner); Rochester (José Iturbi); Indianapolis (Fabien Sevitzky). Of the 18 major-league orchestras only one looked like a war casualty: the Kansas City Philharmonic had lost its conductor, Karl Krueger, to Detroit and had as yet no plans.