Timpani-Tempered Tyrant

Says German Conductor Hermann Scherchen: "I enjoy doing what other conductors don't want to do or can't do." Known to U.S. listeners--from his records only--as a master of the classical repertory, he is equally famed in Europe as the tireless proselytizer for modern music, the man who got hearings for Berg, Von Webern, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Milhaud long before their names had seeped into the record catalogues. Last week Conductor Scherchen was out plugging the work of another early comrade in music; in Frankfurt he conducted a series of packed performances of Igor Stravinsky's witty 18th century-styled opera, The Rake's Progress.

Scherchen displayed a conducting technique as precise and economical as the motions of a tailor threading a needle. In the climactic passages, he laid into his work with a vigor that set his white hair flopping. The result was a finely tooled performance, full of the nuances and dynamics that are Scherchen's stamp.

VistaVision. To some listeners, Scherchen's musical concepts seem to have an oppressively Teutonic solemnity, partially because he sometimes favors slow tempi. But in large works, such as Berlioz' Requiem Mass, he succeeds in conveying a stunning sense of power. His recent recording (for Westminster) of the Requiem has a VistaVisioned breadth that probably no other conductor could bring to it. Yet Scherchen also has remarkable ability to draw forth individual strands, delineating them in unforgettable detail.

Now 67, Scherchen is trailed virtually everywhere he goes by four students whom he accepts only on condition that they will spend three years with him ("My requirements from my students are so extravagant that they have little time for personal life"). Himself a onetime viola prodigy, he made his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic when he was 20. In his years of battling for new works, he has developed a reputation of being the timpani-tempered tyrant of European music. He generally bans composers from rehearsals of their own works, never hesitates to cut whole passages from new works he disagrees with.

Electronic Future. Scherchen is as famed for stinginess as for temperament: friends joke that he planned the birth of his four younger children in England (he has a total of eight children by three wives) to take advantage of the National Health Service. One of Scherchen's passions away from the podium is experimenting with "everything that conserves sound"; at his home at Gravesano, Switzerland, he has built what he regards as "the most advanced electracoustically experimental studios in the world." Recently he has developed a "stereophoner," an electronic device that gives the illusion of stereophonic sound to monaural recordings. Technology, rather than talent, Scherchen believes, will determine the music of the future. Says he: "We do not live in an age of great creativity."

Scherchen has strong views about U.S. orchestras: they have become so technically perfect that "they no longer risk" experiments in contemporary idioms such as jazz ("I luff der jass"). He has been invited to the U.S. many times, has refused because he was expected to do a whole series of conventional programs ("the Tchaikovsky Pathetique on one concert and Beethoven's Fifth on the next"). Says he: "I do not have to conduct works I don't like. I will not conduct to order."

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