Music: Fastest-Moving Conductor

In the town of Besangon in eastern France, some of the world’s best-known batons were wagging last week. Besangon’s annual International Music Festival had invited conducting stars such as Pierre Monteux and Andre Cluytens. But the attention of most festival goers was focused on a tanned, tense young newcomer: 28-year-old American Conductor Lorin Maazel.

Although he is known in the U.S. only by a handful of recordings, Conductor Maazel (rhymes with Pa’s bell) has built a European reputation as perhaps the fastest-moving young conductor of his generation. In the five years since he made his European debut, he has conducted most of the Continent’s great orchestras, has appeared often at Milan’s La Scala and in Vienna. A superb technician, Maazel invariably impresses older musicians with the vast amount of music he carries about in his head and the maturity of his musical ideas. “He is not sensational,” said Violinist Isaac Stern after playing with him recently. “He is a little better than that. He is good.”

French-born Conductor Maazel started studying violin in Paris, came to the U.S. with his parents before World War II ‘and confounded experts by ably conducting some of the country’s better orchestras when he was only nine. Later he managed to combine a college career (University of Pittsburgh) with a job as assistant conductor and violinist in the Pittsburgh Symphony. He also learned to master every other instrument in the orchestra, plus African drums (which he plays with one hand and a pencil).

Newly married, he left for Italy in 1952 on a Fulbright grant. Nowadays his rigidly imposed training schedule includes 90 minutes a day for violin practice, regular composition (mostly unpublished chamber works). He is already working on scores he will conduct three years from now (“The music must sink in”). He memorizes all scores, usually on a first reading, and claims to have such absolute pitch that he can identify the make and model of most cars by ear. “I drive my car mostly by ear,” he says, “and shift gears when the pitch of the motor reaches B flat.”