Coming of Age

Old patrons of the San Diego Symphony could hardly believe their eyes: 4,000 of their fellow townsmen streamed into Balboa Park's Ford Bowl for the city's largest symphonic turnout in many a season. Then they could hardly believe their ears: the San Diego Symphony played its way through a difficult program of concertos with Pianist Rudolf Serkin, and played beautifully. Critics, customers and Pianist Serkin all agreed: the orchestra had come of age. So had the conductor; at 39, Robert Shaw had made the difficult transition from a brilliant leader of voices to a topnotch director of musicians.

In 1953 symphony in San Diego was in the doldrums, and hating it, and Conductor Shaw was riding the high tide of success, and hating it too. Restless, volatile Bob Shaw felt that he had come as far as he could with Manhattan's famed amateur Collegiate Chorale, the Robert Shaw Chorale and the smaller voice groups that ballooned him from a $35-a-week arranger for Fred Waring to a creative, sensitive stylist who could make some $75,000 a year. Shaw was looking for an orchestra to work and learn with. When San Diego issued the call, he lost no time in saying yes.

During his first two seasons, the musicians treated the stocky (178 Ibs., 5 ft. 10 1/2 in.) new conductor as a kind of musical Boy Scout, frequently were noisy in rehearsals and harried him with unimportant questions. But this year they defer to his authority with respectful silence, pass their questions up through the concertmaster. Shaw, at home with the instruments as never before, is using a baton for the first time. "I'm beginning to feel the orchestra in my fingers now," he said last week. "My fingers taste the sound; my ears taste the sound. I can't explain it--I just am closer." For Shaw this first permanent conducting is a combination training ground and experiment in audience acceptance. Instead of programming the light music usually served up to hot-weather audiences, he is putting San Diegans through a stiff summer course.

Shaw is able and willing to pay for his experiment, is plowing back all his salary and some $3,000 more into the orchestra to get the talent and programming that he wants. But how long Conductor Shaw's San Diego phase will last nobody knows; this nervous man in a hurry is allergic to stagnation. Says Shaw: "The ages 45 to 65 are a man's most productive years, and I'm just ten months short of 40--so I haven't any time to lose."

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