Orchestras: Bucharest Battle

On paper, it looked like a shoo-in for the East. The Moscow Philharmonic, one of Europe’s best, had come to Bucharest to play in the triennial Georges Enesco Festival with a repertory of surefire, splashy Russian music. On hand as challenger was the parvenu Los Angeles Philharmonic on a State Department-sponsored visit. To stack the cards even further, festival officials told Conductor Zubin Mehta that he must remove the scheduled Tchaikovsky Fourth from his program; Russian music, Mehta was informed, belonged to Russian orchestras. With concerts by the two ensembles scheduled only 24 hours apart, observers watched for signs of Rumanian cultural partisanship.

The signs came. The mercurial Rumanians, whose Latin origins may have instilled a certain coolness toward Slav ic influences, swept the box office clean of tickets for the Californians’ two concerts. The black market became so brisk that scalpers were buying from each other, and at one concert, 600 crashers forced their way in. The next night the Russians played; there were enough empty spaces in the hall to drive a tractor around in, and the crowd dwindled further at intermission. It wasn’t that Conductor Kiril Kondrashin had given a poor concert; it was just that the exuberance of Mehta, his orchestra, and Negro Pianist Andre Watts’s performance of a Liszt concerto were a hard act to follow.

Cheers, floral tributes and demands for encores greeted the Angelenos’ two concerts, not the least because Mehta had complimented the audiences by conducting one of Enesco’s Rumanian Rhapsodies from memory, while Kondrashin had used a printed score. At the top, anyway, the fray was friendly. The two conductors met, joked, and talked about politics. Said the vanquished Kondrashin to the victorious Mehta after the Californians’ debut: “Maestro, it was beautiful.”