In the Legato Line

The conductor appeared transformed by the music. His pudgy body swayed on the podium; his moon face was pop-eyed with pleasure. Occasionally, listeners close to the stage could hear him snort with excitement. At Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium, Conductor Josef Krips gave agile proof that he is descended from a long line of conductors of the Viennese school, a special breed that has all but disappeared from the world's concert halls, a line that once rang with such great names as Gustav Mahler, Felix Weingartner (Krips's teacher), Franz Schalk and Bruno Walter. What those artists had in common, says the Buffalo Symphony's Krips, was a sense of continuity, a conviction that music should be "one long legato line." Krips's own legato line as he conducts Beethoven and Brahms is as admired as any in the world, and at Lewisohn it has become the artistic high point of the summer concert season.

The hallmark of a Krips performance, as capacity crowds learned last week, is not only continuity but clarity, momentum, and an unremitting sense of tension that lends new life to the weariest war-horses in the world of music. Last week the programs included the Beethoven Seventh and Ninth symphonies, and the Third "Leonore" Overture--and for each work, Krips provided fine readings that did full justice to the music's grand design while ignoring none of its wondrous intricate detail.

Prayer & Pickles. Krips's belief that "we must apply the technique of the singer to the instruments" stems from his own early training. Son of a physician, he sang for ten years in boys' choirs under Vienna's leading conductors. Weingartner hired him as chorus master of the Volksoper when he was only 18, and by his mid-20s, when he was appointed music director of the Hoftheater in Karlsruhe, he was already building a reputation as one of Europe's finest opera conductors. For three wartime years (1942-45), he labored in a pickle factory; at war's end he virtually rebuilt the musical life of Vienna by pulling together the Staatsoper and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Krips took over the Buffalo Symphony in 1954, and under him it has performed with a professional polish that would do credit to a city several times Buffalo's size. Part of the trick in leading an orchestra, suggests Krips, is adroit use of psychology. For the first year, he asked the Buffalo musicians to pray before every concert: "I told them we are not playing Beethoven, we are privileged to play Beethoven; let us pray that we have the blessing to play it well."

Practice & Perfection. Now one of the world's most widely traveled conductors (120 concerts and 76,000 miles in a recent season), Krips moves restlessly between an apartment in Buffalo, a chalet in Switzerland, and hotel suites around the world. At 60, he believes that "human life is too short to know even one great work to perfection"; although he has conducted the Beethoven Ninth Symphony again and again (17 times this season), he feels that he is a long way from mastering it. ("In five years my Beethoven will be entirely different.") He recalls that 14 years ago he heard the late Bruno Walter lead a dazzling performance of Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony. Backstage. Conductor Walter responded to Krips's congratulations with a look of surprise. "But. my dear," said he, "you must not forget that I am 71."

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