Conductors: A Tree Grows at Tanglewood

When Conductor Erich Leinsdorf arrived at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra this summer, he announced his plans in a gentle flurry of aphorisms. “Tanglewood is a tree with many branches,” he has said in a typical comment on the bucolic Massachusetts festival. “You can’t tell which will wither away and which will blossom.” Last week, as the Tanglewood season closed to the music of rave reviews, the Tanglewood tree, well-watered at the roots, seemed to be blooming more richly than ever.

Festival Spirit. Tanglewood has been the Boston’s summer home for 27 years, and its musical standards have always been as high as the orchestra’s. But over the course of Charles Munch’s 13-year reign as Boston’s maestro, Tanglewood wilted sadly in the August heat.

Munch was little interested in teaching, weary from his long winter, remote from Tanglewood’s earnest youthfulness. When Leinsdorf was appointed to succeed Munch last fall, Tanglewood’s friends took heart: the 50-year-old Vienna-born conductor seemed just the man. “He has a festival spirit,” said Bass Clarinetist Rosario Mazzeo, the B.S.O.’s personnel manager. “He has the most extraordinary set of qualities — his time is laid out by an IBM com puter, but he’s available to everybody. He could manage General Motors.”

Throughout the eight-week festival, Leinsdorf more than lived up to such high praise. He rose each day for an 8 a.m. breakfast, filled the mornings with rehearsals and conducting classes, the afternoons with conferences and more rehearsals, the evenings with performances. He played through a Mozart series, a Prokofiev cycle, and led his orchestra through a total of 32 works ne—W to Tanglewood, including the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.

Astonishing Lesson. For his 300 students, Leinsdorf mixed wit, energy and a towering musical intelligence to give them a vigorous summer of learning. He brought in soloists such as Pianists Lorin Hollander and Malcolm Frager to talk with his students, and even induced Eugene Ormandy to conduct the Tanglewood student orchestra. Taking a place in the orchestra himself, he was unsparing with the large batch of student conductors who turned up this year. Stopping the young conductors in mid-beat, he would say, “Why didn’t the orchestra play for you there? Are you taking the orchestra’s tempo or are they taking yours? Be honest with me.”

But the season was more than an astonishingly good lesson in how to run a music festival. Attendance climbed along with interest and good reviews, and among the Boston’s musicians, morale was never higher. “The orchestra has enjoyed his easy way,” says Mazzeo, whose post as complaint clerk for all the other musicians makes his praise of a conductor unique. “We’ve had more fun this summer than we’ve ever had before.”