Le Beau Charles

It was mid-season--a time when symphony conductors take a rest and the players try to fathom the strange habits of guest conductors. With Conductor Artur Rodzinski away, the men of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony had just gotten used to fiddling and blowing in the allout way Guest Conductor Leopold Stokowski wanted. Now they had to get used to another guest conductor.

The new man, Charles Munch, France's greatest conductor, pleaded with the men in rehearsal: "Gentlemen, gentlemen! Please play lightly." When the orchestra finally caught on, Charles Munch threw the men a kiss and shouted "Bravo!" In the musicians' locker room afterward, there was a buzz of enthusiasm; a good many of the Philharmonic players had caught some of the Munch spirit that is proverbial in Paris.

Conductor Munch, a well-set-up 55, is an Alsatian who learned conducting from Wilhelm Furtwangler in Leipzig. In 1938 he became conductor of the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, Paris' oldest symphony orchestra, soon had a following of hundreds of French women who bought season tickets for concerts of "le beau Charles," without even caring what he was to play. The Conservatoire directors cared, though. They admitted that he got brilliant tone quality out of his musicians, but they did not share his enthusiasm for contemporary music. Three months ago the directors ordered him to conduct more familiar symphonies. Munch resigned. (He could afford to: his wife, a Swiss condensed-milk heiress, is a very wealthy woman.)

For guest appearances in his first visit to the U.S., Munch was allowed to pick his own programs. In Boston, where he made a big hit, Beacon Hill rustled with rumors that he would succeed 72-year-old Serge Koussevitzky as the Boston's permanent conductor.*

For his two weeks with the New York Philharmonic, Munch scheduled nine pieces by six Frenchmen. In his first Manhattan appearance last week, critics panned his Ravel and Debussy (they thought he overdid them), but cheered the first U.S. performance of French Dissonantist Arthur Honegger's Third (Liturgique) Symphony. It clanked through a violent first movement, settled into a lyric, prayer-like second movement and after an explosive climax in the third concluded with a wispy, ethereal melody. Said Conductor Munch: "It is horizontal music, rather stern and unsentimental, and as such, an expression of our times."

* Dr. Koussevitzky too was on his annual vacation. In his absence, the Boston will be led for a month by 28-year-old Leonard Bernstein, Koussevitzky's favorite protege, and also mentioned as a likely successor.

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