Engineers to the Fore

Three and a half years ago when the Philadelphia Orchestra started broadcasting, nothing so incensed Conductor Leopold Stokowski as the thought that mere radio engineers had the power to regulate his music, to tone down his surging crescendos, to increase the volume of his fragile pianissimos. After his first few broadcasts Stokowski determined to operate the controls himself. Radio authorities were beside themselves but Stokowski would hear no arguments. He was finally given a desk fitted with dials which he could twiddle to his heart's content. The wires were not connected. Hidden from sight was a working set of controls which engineers manipulated as before.

Stokowski's numerous radio experiments have been loudly publicized. For a time his chief desire was to hear how his music sounded to outsiders, so he had a soundproof glass box made for himself, stood inside it to conduct, listened to his results through a loudspeaker. Later radio officials decided that he would never be satisfied until he had actually handled the controls. An attempt or two convinced him that the job was too finicky to combine with conducting.

Last week Philadelphia's blond-mopped maestro tried a new move, exalting the engineers whom once he had scorned. In front of his dais on the Academy of Music stage a control desk was set up, with a maze of wires leading from it to the wings. Throughout the program LeRoy Anspach and Dunham Gilbert, two of Columbia Broadcasting System's crack engineers, sat there. Hitherto Stokowski's broadcasts have been monitored from a booth in the wings. But before last week's concert Stokowski announced that they played too vital a part to be kept in the background. His mind would be easier if he had them in front of him, watching his face, perhaps catching the sudden inspirations to which his orchestramen respond.

Few radio listeners appreciate the importance of good engineers. In Philadelphia last week LeRoy Anspach, a capable pianist, followed the scores note by note. Some of the soft, eerie passages in Rachmaninoff's Island of the Dead might have been lost if Anspach had not pointed them out a second ahead of time to Engineer Gilbert who by a turn of the dial gave them proper volume. The thundering climaxes in Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung might have overloaded the amplifiers, resulted in blasts and distortion if the flow of electrical energy had not been monitored.

When performances are broadcast from Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, Engineer Charles Grey is monitor. National Broadcasting Co. uses four microphones at the Metropolitan, sometimes more. Engineer Grey, a rugged Down-Easterner from Portland, Me., sits in a second-tier box and sees that the music which comes from all four mikes is adjusted so evenly that it will sound over the radio just as it does in the great auditorium.

On the Pontiac Motor Car hour Engineer William Shearer is the juggler who balances the comical dialog of Stoopnagle & Budd with a big mixed chorus; makes wee Jeannie Lang, a whispering soprano, sound as effective as William O'Neal, a full-blown tenor.

Columbia's most difficult program has been the March of TIME, engineered by Richard Stuart and Mason Escher. It has used sound effects varying from the roar of cannons to the voice of Samuel Insull's conscience.

The leading behind-scene operators have had much the same past. As boys they tinkered ceaselessly with home-made wireless sets, grew up to operate ships' radios or to work in small land stations. Even since they have become experts few of them are paid more than $50 a week, a small fraction of an announcer's salary.

Teamwork

Thirty-three years ago a ruddy-cheeked Russian who wore startlingly high collars and frizzly hair standing on end arrived in the U. S. to give piano recitals. U. S. audiences took instantly to Ossip Salomonowitsch Gabrilowitsch. He became a fixture on the U. S. musical scene, married Clara Clemens, Mark Twain's daughter, in 1918 became conductor of the Detroit Symphony. When Violinist Albert Spalding started to plow out his career, he reversed the route Gabrilowitsch had taken. In the U. S. Spalding found that it was a handicap to be the handsome, athletic-looking son of a rich U. S. sporting-goods manufacturer. Audiences, he said, seemed to expect him to come on the platform in a baseball suit. Albert Spalding packed up his violin, went to Russia, made his name there. But throughout their careers Spalding and Gabrilowitsch have had one rare quality in common: no amount of success has spoiled their selfless, unaffected devotion to music.

This winter Spalding & Gabrilowitsch have twice chosen to combine their talents, to play sonatas for the piano and violin which most musicians either neglect or use to exhibit their individual virtuosity. Last week Manhattan's Town Hall filled quickly and completely to hear the team play Brahms's A Major Sonata, Mozart's B Flat Sonata, and Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata (socalled because Beethoven dedicated it to Rodolphe Kreutzer, a French violinist who never took the trouble to play it). Throughout the program the two submerged their personalities to make music that was perfectly balanced, completely eloquent in itself.

Few prominent musicians are capable of such teamwork, even for the sake of filling a hall in hard times. Mischa Elman's sweet, sentimental tones would scarcely blend very well with, for example, the fast-fingered playing of Vladimir Horowitz. It would be difficult to imagine cool, imperturbable Jascha Heifetz teaming with turbulent Ignace Jan Paderewski, or to picture grave Fritz Kreisler playing with elfin Jose Iturbi.

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