The Diffident Dutchman

The stage was set for a real-life version of the scene in which the Unknown Young Musician gets his Big Break, triumphs, and rockets to international fame. But the hero balked.

Amsterdam's renowned, 78-year-old Concertgebouw Orchestra, on the eve of a 1956 performance of the Cherubini Requiem in C Minor, desperately needed a substitute for ailing Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini; it turned to 27year-old Bernard Haitink, an assistant conductor and former second violinist of the Dutch Radio Orchestra, who had led the work not long before. "No," replied Haitink. "I'm not ready, and anyway, I'd like to stay alive." Hotter heads prevailed. Haitink conducted, and the familiar scenario spun to its happy conclusion: he was invited back by the Concertgebouw, soon began guest-conducting all over Europe and America, joined the Concertgebouw as a permanent conductor in 1961, took over as its music director in 1964. Today, at 38, he says: "I'm still alive, and so is the orchestra, and 1 think we get on together."

Too Many Downs. They do get on harmoniously, although somewhat in the relationship of a national monument and its custodian. In a profession where flamboyance and arrogance are often the hallmarks of talent, the diffident Haitink is an anomaly. A short (5 ft. 6 in.), quiet man who likes to take long birdwatching rambles in the woods, he is still slightly awed by the Concertge-bouw's tradition of polished, mellow musicianship and its line of distinguished conductors, particularly Willem Mengelberg and Eduard van Beinum.

He was brought up in a prosperous, nonmusical Amsterdam family, "drifted" into music as a violin student at nine, admits that most of his conducting has been learned in on-the-job training. Sometimes painfully self-deprecating ("Of course you have ups and downs, but I am a conductor who has too many downs"), he feels he got the Concertgebouw post at his age only as "a credit card for the future."

The only time Haitink acts the part of a confident conductor is when he steps on the podium. Then he is all that might be expected of somebody who is regarded as one of the top younger figures in the field--firm, precise, sensitive, adept at molding the rich chiaroscuro of the Concertgebouw sound without blurring the melodies or jostling the rhythms. Under his baton, the orchestra is not yet burnished to the glow it had under Mengelberg, and in some of the repertory he has not yet overcome a faint tendency toward coolness and restraint. But when he conducts the full, darkly romantic music that seems to echo the Dutch temperament--Mahler or Bruckner, for example--he is superb.

Solid Payment. Last week, on its fourth U.S. visit, the Concertgebouw left New York on its way to the Midwest, playing college concerts at Yale, Rochester and Oberlin. The highlight at every stop was a broad, impeccably phrased performance of Bruckner's Symphony No. 7. Haitink's carefully reasoned, deeply felt interpretation brought out each secondary melody and delicately balanced the softest shimmer of strings with the noblest blast of brass. Yet, as he built from climax to climax, he never lost sight of the unifying line in the hour-long score. It was not only magnificent music making but also a solid payment on Haitink's credit card.

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