Orchestras

Last week, as the winter symphonic season approached its end, boards of directors and impresarios were either doleful or delighted over prospects for 1938-39. Deepest dumps were in Portland, Ore., where the 27-year-old Portland Symphony, in spite of assiduous nursing by Conductor Willem van Hoogstraten, gave its last concert and disbanded for lack of funds. Loudest whooping came from Manhattan, where NBC officials announced proudly that famed Maestro Toscanini had signed up for another three years of expensive winter symphonic broadcasts.

More whoops came from Pittsburgh and Kansas City, homes of two of the youngest big U. S. symphony orchestras. Reason: both the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Kansas City Philharmonic signed up permanent conductors. To Pittsburgh went pudgy, astringent Fritz Reiner who, since resigning from the leadership of the Cincinnati Symphony in 1931, has guest-conducted here and there and headed the orchestra department of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. Kansas City signed its first long-term contract with U. S.-born Karl Krueger who, during the past five years, has been whipping its depression-born orchestra into a first-class organization.

Pittsburgh, dazzled with its brand-new $250,000 symphony orchestra, formed last fall, had been trying on conductors like a rejuvenated dowager trying on new hats. In the 'nineties and the early 1900s Pittsburgh boasted a respectable symphony orchestra under genial Victor Herbert (Babes in Toyland, Kiss Me Again), and sternly mustached Emil Paur. In 1910 the orchestra collapsed, remained collapsed for 16 years. Subsequent revival, on a shoe-string budget under Conductor Antonio Modarelli, was halfhearted.

At the close of the 1936-37 season last spring, Manager Specter and his socialite executive board set out to get 1) a stout purse, 2) a first-rate conductor, 3) top-notch musicians, announced a drive for $300,000, proposed to import seven well-known conductors for guest appearances. The drive was a success. To Pittsburgh went successively: 1) gaunt, funereal Otto Klemperer, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; 2) Cincinnati's Eugene Goossens; 3) Fritz Reiner; 4) Mexico's Carlos Chavez; 4) NBC's Walter Damrosch; 6) Michel Gusikoff, former concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra; and 7) Rumania's Georges Enesco. To Klemperer went the job of rebuilding the new orchestra. He heard auditions, reshuffled the old personnel, sweated his musicians into top-notch form, followed with a series of performances that brought stolid Pittsburgh audiences to their feet, yelling & stamping. At the season's close, Klemperer was offered the job but decided to stay in Los Angeles. Second choice fell to 49-year-old Budapest-born Reiner, whose second wife, former Actress Carlotta Irwin, is the daughter of the late Pittsburgh Skylight Manufacturer Thomas W. Irwin. Conductor Reiner, long known among orchestra musicians as one of the most crotchety and technically efficient conductors in the U. S., conducts without score, loves spaghetti.

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