Oklahoma Maestro

After the concert, the Minneapolis Symphony's conductor greeted a five-year-old backstage visitor. Patting the small, curly head, the conductor asked: "And what do you expect to do when you grow up, little man?" The boy replied: "Direct a symphony. I'll conduct your orchestra, too."

This week Victor Alessandro, 29, is making good his 24-year-old threat. From the podium of Oklahoma City's Municipal Auditorium he will guest-conduct the Minneapolis Symphony. And the experience will not be particularly novel. In the past six years, small, stocky Conductor Alessandro has led his own Oklahoma

State Symphony through some 100 concerts from the same platform.

Self-assured Victor Alessandro became a conductor by the practical process of building up an orchestra of his own. When he finished studying in Rome and Salzburg (1938), he shrewdly left Eastern music centers, to return to the Southwest where there is more musical room-at-the-top. He took over the struggling, WPA-financed Oklahoma State Symphony, gave its discouraged musicians new enthusiasm. The big oil men who had sneered at the WPA's "Roosevelt fiddlers" liked Alessandro's orchestra and kept it going when the Federal funds stopped. This year they will raise $165,000 to pay for next season's music. (Alessandro needs a big budget because he insists on free concerts.)

Big-time guest soloists who visit Oklahoma rapidly succumb to Maestro Alessandro's easy, breezy charm. Jascha Heifetz, a normally cool and noncommittal artist, thawed to the point of telling Oklahomans: "I am going to do all 1 can to make the Oklahoma Symphony known--but it will be known without me."

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