Young Man with a Stick

To most U.S. music listeners, Milton Katims is not a familiar name, but it soon may be. No one else his age (38) has managed to link his career with the top names in two musical fields: Toscanini and the Budapest String Quartet. This week for the first time he conducted Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra in the first of two Sunday broadcasts.

He has fashioned his career as carefully as Amati fashioned violins. As a violist, he bows to few besides William Primrose. His recording with the Budapest String Quartet of the Mozart C Major Quintet was chosen, by five U.S. music critics in the Review of Recorded Music, as the outstanding chamber-music album of 1946. Yet he took up the viola as a means to an end: conducting.

As a boy in a Brooklyn family in which everyone sang or played an instrument but father, he got a violin. When he decided in college to become a conductor, he switched instruments. He had thought it all out: violists don't have to work as hard as first violinists; they play a middle voice in an orchestra and thus they can better observe the higher & lower tones around them; and best of all, they sit strategically in front of the podium, with a good view of the conductor at work. It took him three years to master the viola ("you have to dig deeper on it").

Scissors & Paste Pot. For eight years, he played at Manhattan's radio station WOR as soloist, later became assistant conductor of Alfred Wallenstein's Sinfonietta. He learned a lot of the tricks of harried radio staff conductors, how to comb the files for scissors-&-paste-pot script music to conduct on half an hour's notice. He switched to NBC for less money so that he could learn conducting from Toscanini.

With a borrowed pass, young Milton once tried to sneak into a chorus in which his mother and sister were singing, for a closeup view of the maestro, and was kicked out. Later he found it almost as hard to get to play under the maestro. When he became one of NBC's two staff conductors (the other: H. Leopold Spitalny), Petrillo's musicians' union would not let him keep his post in Toscanini's orchestra as violist. The union argued that he would be keeping another violist out of work. He contended that playing under Toscanini was irreplaceable experience for his conducting career. He finally won, but he is allowed to play in the orchestra only when Toscanini is conducting.

A Few Pointers. Katims' reverence for Toscanini is always apparent. His second child, a girl, was born on Toscanini's 80th birthday last March. He and his wife (Concert Cellist Virginia Peterson) named the girl Pamela Artura and persuaded Toscanini to be her godfather. At rehearsals last week, Toscanini, who is vacationing, showed up at the studio, sat quietly in a seat in the rear of the auditorium. Afterwards Toscanini took him out to his Riverdale (N.Y.) home to give his pupil a few final pointers about Mendelssohn's Scotch Symphony and Aram Khatchaturian's flashy Gayne Suite. At the broadcast, Toscanini clapped like a veteran of the claque, afterwards went to Katims' dressing room and bussed him.

Once, when Toscanini was conducting the orchestra, he noticed that Katims was not sitting in the first violist's chair. He asked why, and was told that Katims was off conducting elsewhere. "Why should anyone want to wave a stick when he can play the viola like that?" said Toscanini. "Anyone can wave a stick."

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