Turbulent Iturbi

The luxury of a bad temper, indulged in regularly by conductors of great orchestras in. the winter, is something which most second-string, summertime maestros cannot afford. An exception is dark little Jose Iturbi, explosive Spanish conductor-pianist. Last summer Iturbi had one tantrum in Cleveland because his audiences munched hot dogs, another in Philadelphia because photographers' flashbulbs annoyed him (TIME, Sept. 7). In Philadelphia again this summer as leader of the Robin Hood Dell Orchestra, Iturbi waited until last week, an exceptionally hot one in the breezeless park, to go into his annual pet.

Asked to give a concert, mostly of U. S. music, for the benefit of the Musicians' Union, Iturbi arranged his program with time out for solos by Radio Singers Lucy Monroe and Jan Peerce. Half the program was to be broadcast by NBC, and Iturbi understood, or so he said later, that during that half he would lead the orchestra. When he arrived at the Dell, however, Iturbi found that Singers Peerce and Monroe were about to go on the air with songs by Gershwin, Victor Herbert, Oley Speaks, Jerome Kern. Frank La Forge, Daniel Wolf, Coleridge Taylor. Conductor Iturbi was not expected to accompany these songs and singers, but his emotional temperature began rising rapidly. He heard Mr. Peerce through two numbers, then strode upon the Dell stage, and began gesticulating at a radio announcer.

While radio listeners all over the U. S. were switched to an emergency organ recital, Iturbi explained the interruption backstage. "There is good American music," he cried, "but all this I-love-you stuff is just trash. It is far below 'the dignity of the orchestra to play such cheap, rotten music. See, I cannot permit such stuff on a broadcast ... I have been put in a spot. I refuse to go on with the program unless the songs are cut out." Harassed Dell officials finally coddled Iturbi into going on with the program, putting the rest of the "Iloveyou" songs off to the end. Mollified, the muscular maestro--who used to be an amateur boxer and was interviewed as such last week by Sports Writer Cy Peterman of the Philadelphia Bulletin--seated himself at the piano, gave an account of the Rhapsody in Blue of the late George Gershwin,* which for technical brilliance and jazz feeling topped anything Gershwin or Roy Bargy ever did with the work.

Next day Iturbi was downright contrite when he was jumped upon by "trash" composers, their friends and Edwin Claude Mills of the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers, the latter suggesting that his potent organization might forbid Iturbi to play its copyrighted works. Hastily Iturbi withdrew his remarks about "trash," revised them to refer to "very light songs that anybody can hear any time over the air." Fearful of offending Gershwin partisans, Iturbi insisted that he had gone to see Girl Crazy no less than 14 times.

*In Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium last week an all-Gershwin program by soloists and the New York Philharmonic Symphony attracted 20,223 people, largest audience in the Stadium's history.

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