Music: Welcome to Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh last week scored the musical coup of the season.

Conductorless ever since Fritz Reiner’s angry resignation (TIME, March 8), Pittsburgh’s Symphony Society had been borrowing any top conductors it could lay hands on to lead the orchestra, if only for a few concerts. There was one man in particular they wanted, and last week, when La Scala Milan’s famed Victor de Sabata appeared for the first of four guest spots, Pittsburgh decided that a few brassy fanfares were called for. All of Manhattan’s first-string critics were invited, and they accepted.

It certainly wasn’t De Sabata’s first program that lured the critics. There was only one new work, a viciously dissonant and twisting symphonic poem, Marinaresca e Baccanale, by a little known Italian contemporary named Giorgio Federico Ghedini. The others—Berlioz’ blood & thunder Roman Carnival Overture, Franck’s D Minor Symphony and Ravel’s Bolero—were the kind of overly familiar music that delights most audiences and drugs most critics.

At first, the audience in Pittsburgh’s Syria Mosque was stunned by De Sabata’s strange choreography on the podium—he seemed to be dancing everything from a tarantella to a sabre dance. But by the time he had driven Berlioz’ old warhorse around the course, whipping it for all it was worth, the audience couldn’t get to its feet fast enough. The passion and power he found in César Franck’s over-explored symphony won him another wild ovation before intermission. And by the time his program was over, Victor de Sabata had Pittsburgh in his pocket. After the pounding, accelerating bombardment of Bolero, there was a full minute of silence, as the audience pulled itself together. Then came the cheers. Next morning the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviewed the concert on Page One; the afternoon Sun-Telegraph and Press gave it frontpage headlines.

In Toscanini’s Shoes. Conductor de Sabata had been heard in the U.S. only once before, 21 years ago in Cincinnati. A friend of his in Milan, Arturo Toscanini, had urged him to go to Cincinnati, and when De Sabata got back to Milan, Toscanini had prepared another job for him. Victor de Sabata has been filling Toscanini’s shoes at La Scala ever since. Some Italian critics, in fact, rate him above Toscanini as a conductor, an excess of praise which De Sabata doesn’t seek. He still refers to Toscanini as “Maestro” and means it literally. He was pleased pink last summer when Toscanini told him that La Scala’s orchestra and chorus “sounds better than when I left it.”

Last week, when De Sabata limped to the podium (he has a game leg), bowed to the audience, then returned to the orchestra, he reminded some in the audience of his master. De Sabata, who is 56, is 25 years younger and considerably taller than Toscanini, with a face like a Caesar. But from the rear, he has the same pink, bald scalp ringed with white.

In rehearsal, Pittsburgh’s musicians found that he resembled Toscanini in another way. In a towering rage he shouted: “No! No! Warm it up! It is no good if it is not warm!” His windmilling was nothing like Toscanini’s economy of gesture, but in its different way it did not seem wasteful: he got the musicians playing over their heads. Says De Sabata: “I scold them, tease them and torment them—but they play very nice—they give.”

Composer in the Wings. The first music Victor de Sabata ever conducted was a composition of his own, at the Milan Conservatory—at the age of twelve. Six years later, La Scala produced his first opera, Il Macigno. When Toscanini brought the La Scala orchestra to the U.S. on tour in 1920-1, he played De Sabata’s symphonic poem Juventus on every program. Now better known as conductor than composer, De Sabata insists with a smile that his is “a beastly profession.” He swears he would rather have his two children, Elios, 17, and Eliana, 13, be “thieves or murderers than musicians.”