New Maestro for Cleveland

It was a difficult search. After more than a year of looking for a successor to the late George Szell, who died in July 1970 at 73, the Cleveland Orchestra last week chose 41-year-old Lorin Maazel. Endowed with stamina, sensitivity and intelligence, Maazel is a former child prodigy who at the age of eleven was guest conductor of Toscanini's NBC Symphony. One day, when he showed up to rehearse the NBC, he found all 100 or so musicians sucking lollipops. That might have finished any other child right then and there. Not Maazel. "I was a pretty tough kid," he recalls.

Even so, Maazel is unlikely to prove as tough as the stony-faced Szell, who also began as a child prodigy. Few conductors could. In every other way, he seems to be the one youngish maestro around who most resembles Szell in style, craftsmanship and musical taste. Like his predecessor, Maazel is a strict constructionist who regards the printed score as his own personal bill of rights. He is capable of passion, but not at the expense of symmetry and the sturdy line. He is widely acknowledged as a supreme podium technician.

In the more than 3,000 concerts Maazel has given with virtually every major orchestra in the world during the past two decades, he has shown that his heart is as old-fashioned as was Szell's. Cleveland listeners may expect large doses of the 19th century (Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky), snippets of Baroque (Bach, mostly) and careful slices of the 20th century (Sibelius, Stravinsky, Bartok). Thus the Maazel appointment means that Cleveland intends to continue its Old World ways, with one important exception: Maazel (born in Paris of California parents) is only the second American, after Leonard Bernstein, ever to head one of the five top orchestras in the U.S.

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