Sarah's Women

By William Bender

The podium of the New York Philharmonic is one of the pinnacles of American symphonic music and, like most others, a male bastion. Over the years, such men as Gustav Mahler, Willem Mengelberg and Arturo Toscanini have occupied it, but only one woman had ever conducted a full program there. That was the famed French teacher Nadia Boulanger, who led the orchestra for a week in 1962. Before a capacity crowd of 2,800 in Manhattan's Avery Fisher Hall last week, Sarah Caldwell of Boston joined that illustrious company in one of the remarkable events of this or any other American musical year. Co-sponsored by the Philharmonic and Ms. magazine, the program consisted of the works of five women and was aptly called "A Celebration of Women Composers." It was also a celebration of the vast talents of Sarah Caldwell (TIME cover, Nov. 10), the director of the Opera Company of Boston, whose blossoming conducting career is also taking her this season to the Pittsburgh, New Orleans and San Antonio symphonies and, in January, to the Metropolitan Opera.

One of the Caldwell traits is a certain quaint disarray that can drive the weak of heart to tears. In the final stages of preparing the concert, Sarah demanded and got an extra rehearsal. Cost: $3,500. After the programs were printed, she discovered that the order of works was going to require an awkward rearrangement of the stage seating; the sequence was changed and a mimeographed note inserted in the program. The printed music for Ruth Crawford Seeger's Quartet for String Orchestra arrived late. When it did, some of the parts were missing, and so only the third movement, Andante, was performed.

Despite all that, the concert was a success. Caldwell does not exactly have a classic cuing technique on the order, say, of the late Fritz Reiner. She gives her players exceptional freedom and responsibility. What she concentrates on is the main direction of the music. Her eye and ear ever on the climactic mo ments, she can mass the choirs of the orchestra like artillery. During more intimate moments, she may almost cease directing, confidently letting a first-chair player follow his lyrical bent.

The two big works on the program came off brilliantly. The first was Lili Boulanger's 35-minute dramatic cantata Faust et Helene. The work won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1913 and brought Boulanger instant fame. The younger sister of Nadia, Lili was only 19 at the time; she died of tuberculosis five years later. Faust et Helene shows a youthful and understandable infatuation with both Wagner and Debussy. But it has a fresh, rapturous style that makes one speculate about how her precocious talent might have developed.

Mercurial Wallop. The second major piece was the Clarinet Concerto (1968) by Thea Musgrave, 47, a Scot who now lives in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Though she is just gaining international recognition, Musgrave has written scores of songs, choral, chamber and orchestral works, ballets and operas, and is clearly one of today's major composers, regardless of sex. The concerto is a mercurial mixture of lyricism and virtuoso wallop. The soloist, Stanley Drucker, was required to move around the stage to play with this small instrumental group or that, in a kind of 18th century concertante style. Drucker's stroll may sound gimmicky, but it actually lent visual appeal to an already fascinating piece.

"A Celebration of Women" was more than an evening of good music. Women composers do indeed exist -- and then some. One concert does not, of course, make a revolution. With that in mind, Pierre Boulez and the Philhar monic have already scheduled for later this season works by two other women, Barbara Kolb and Lucia Dlugoszewski. Any other takers?

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