Conductors: Top Face

The walls of Milan’s famed old La Scala opera house almost visibly quivered. Fifteen jazz musicians, sporting candy-striped shirts and elastic armbands, took the stage and let loose with a blistering Strike Up the Band while a covey of chubby little ballerinas in split-to-the-hip satin skirts twitched their pelvises and tried their best to look naughty. Enter a Mississippi riverboat gaily puffing smoke. Switch to an 80-ft.-high wooden Eiffel Tower. Then, rising from beneath the stage on elevator platforms like hosts of angels, the 100-piece orchestra, jazz band, singers and dancers unite for one big, rousing finale.

The occasion was the world premiere last week of Gershwiniana, a $100,000 “ballet-cantata” based on George Gershwin’s music and billed as “a great moment in Italo-American collaboration.” After opening night, the bemused Milanese had another name for it: “La Scala Follies.” The critics had some complaints, some major (Director Maner Lualdi’s failure to stitch the kaleidoscopic scenes into a visual and dramatic whole), and some minor (“How can one stage a 1910 New Orleans dance palace without calling in a single colored face?”).

Secret Lessons. But one colored face was called in. It belonged to Conductor Henry Lewis, and for him the critics had nothing but praise. Lean and rangy as a cowpuncher, he had the orchestra playing in the best big-band tradition of the 1940s for lighter numbers, deftly shaped a generous symphonic sound for Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue with grand, sweeping gestures. Says Lewis: “It’s harder getting a symphony to swing than getting a jazz ensemble to play Bach.” At performance’s end, the audience cried “Grazie, maestro!” and the string players tapped their bows on their instruments, a high compliment that the tradition-minded orchestra has paid to only two other conductors (Herbertvon Karajan and Victor de Sabata) in the past 20 years.

Though Negroes have long had total acceptance in the operatic world as singers (after all, a voice is a voice), they have had slower going in the orchestra pit. Lewis’ only notable predecessor as a Negro conductor was Dean Dixon, now 50, who became the first Negro ever to lead a major U.S. orchestra when he guest-conducted the New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony in the early 1940s. But discouraged by his chances of landing a permanent job in the U.S., he moved to Europe in 1949, then to Australia, where he is currently conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. “One of the most important things I can do now,” says Lewis, “is to give to other Negroes the incentive to try to win positions with symphonic organizations.”

Late Blessings. Lewis himself had to surmount certain obstacles, not the least of which was the opposition of his father, a Los Angeles real estate and automobile salesman who felt that the only music career open to a Negro was as a lowly jazzman. When he was five, his mother sneaked him off to a piano teacher, later encouraged his lessons on the double bass, an instrument he “got stuck with” in order to fill a gap in his high-school orchestra. He also played on the school football team and his father hoped that he might make a career out of it. But when young Henry won a job in the bass-fiddle section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a music scholarship to the University of Southern California, his father finally bestowed his blessings. Drafted in 1954, he toured Europe as conductor of the Seventh Army Symphony. “I conducted every day for a year,” says Lewis, “an opportunity few conductors get. It was a time to make all the mistakes, a luxury you can’t afford when you’re conducting a major symphony. The fact that I’m at La Scala now I probably owe to the Seventh Army.”

Returning home, the scholarly-looking Lewis founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 1958, led it on a 14-country junket through Europe. After serving for three years as associate conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where his quietly authoritative approach was a perfect complement to the flamboyant attack of fiery Zubin Mehta, the orchestra’s resident conductor, Lewis this year was appointed music director of the Los Angeles Opera Company. Now 33, he lives with his wife, Mezzo Soprano Marilyn Home, in a fashionable home in North Hollywood complete with swimming pool. Says Wife Marilyn, who is white: “The question of race is not half as much a problem as these two egos of ours rolling around the same house.”

Lewis’ triumph at La Scala has already won him an invitation to return next season. Says La Scala Artistic Director Francesco Siciliani: “If he could do so much with Gershwin, imagine how he will make Puccini sound!” Yet for all the accolades, Lewis says he felt he had really arrived when, after opening night, he visited the elegant Biffi Scala, which is to Milano operagoers what Sardi’s is to Broadway theater. At his appearance, the chef marched out of the kitchen, cried “Bravissimo, maestro!” and pointed to the latest addition to the menu—a beef fillet smothered in a sauce made of mustard, cognac, sour cream and a heavy dose of pepper. Its name: bistecca Enrico Lewis.