Saints and Sinners

Great Falls, Mont., knows how to whoop it up for Johannes Brahms. After hearing the blazing final chords of the Symphony No. 2 in D, townspeople jumped to their feet in a shouting five-minute ovation. As the applause started to slacken, a rancher in a sheepskin coat shouted from the balcony: "Keep on clappin' and they'll keep on play-in'!" So they did. When Conductor Maurice Abravanel, 73, and the 85 members of the Utah Symphony Orchestra responded with an encore from Handel's Water Music, the crowd in the renovated movie theater burst into cheers.

Such enthusiasm was an almost nightly occurrence as America's most mobile orchestra last week completed a ten-day, 1,200-mile tour crisscrossing the blizzard-swept Continental Divide to make music in Idaho and Montana. They log 15,000 miles annually, playing country churches, school gyms and movie theaters in the Rocky Mountain states. In April they will head east for a three-week tour of nine Midwestern states.

Home-Grown Product. The orchestra's popularity on tour is more than matched at home in Salt Lake City, where its twice-monthly concerts at the 5,200-capacity Mormon Tabernacle are always sold out. In December voters proved their affection by passing an $8.7 million bond issue that will build a home for the orchestra. For the past 30 years, the Mormons have allowed the orchestra free use of the Tabernacle, the famed meetinghouse built in the 1860s under the eye of Brigham Young. The edifice has been a mixed blessing: it has no lobby (latecomers must wait outside), no toilet facilities and no upholstery upon its hardwood benches. Its acoustics are very tricky: a tourist standing 200 feet away can hear a pin drop on stage, but the echo from the vaulted ceiling can be so bad that a new drummer once played the entire Ravel Bolero four beats late. The new arts center will be ready in 1978.

Abravanel's 29 years as music director in Utah is a tenure second among major orchestras only to Eugene Ormandy's 40 years in Philadelphia. Abravanel has built his orchestra gradually and carefully. "My musicians never give less than their best," he told TIME Correspondent Leo Janos. "They are not the equal, by far, of the personnel in the Philadelphia Orchestra. But they communicate. They say something." The product is mostly homegrown; 52 players are from Utah, about 70% are Mormons. Jokes Concertmaster Oscar Chausow, formerly with the Chicago Symphony: "I lead the most devout string section in the country."

Performers at the Tabernacle may not have to be totally devout, but behavior must be impeccable. Soprano Roberta Peters inadvertently caused a scandal once when she was served a cup of tea onstage during rehearsal; tea and coffee are forbidden the Mormons. So are alcoholic beverages. Pianist Jose Iturbi narrowly avoided greater disaster when a bottle of Scotch broke on the floor of his Tabernacle dressing room. A kindly janitor cleaned it up, and kept his mouth shut.

Abravanel, a Jew who traces his ancestry to 15th century Spain, grew up in Lausanne, Switzerland, where his father was a pharmacist. The family lived in the house of famed Swiss Conductor Ernest Ansermet. "Stravinsky and MiIhaud used to visit often," Abravanel recalls. "I played piano four-hands with Stravinsky as a lark." He went to Berlin to study with a brilliant young composer named Kurt Weill. In 1933 both men fled Nazi Germany for Paris. There, Abravanel became a ballet conductor, performing the premiere of the Balanchine-Brecht-Weill ballet-with-song, The Seven Deadly Sins.

Bunch of Cowboys. In 1936 Abravanel sailed for New York and, armed with letters of introduction from Conductors Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwangler, got a job conducting at the Metropolitan Opera. He made his debut conducting Delibes' Lakme, starring Lily Pons. Two years later he quit to become Weill's music director on Broadway, conducting such classics as Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus.

After nearly a decade on Broadway, says Abravanel, "I was 44, and I felt it was time to settle down. I wanted an orchestra of my own to play the classics." Salt Lake City offered him the job of conducting their community orchestra. Abravanel and his wife Lucy left New York for Utah in 1947, telling friends, unwisely as it turned out, that they would be back in a year.

Not long ago Abravanel received a call from some citizens of Dillon, Mont., inviting him to perform there. "We're just a bunch of cowboys," he was told. "Play anything you want." Replied Abravanel: "I think you deserve the best." Dillon was treated to Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. After the first movement there was an ovation. Abravanel explained that the symphony had four movements, so would the audience please save the applause until the end. The audience obediently counted; unfortunately, there was only a slight pause between the third and fourth movements, so that when the symphony crescendoed to conclusion, it was greeted with silence.

Sing-Alongs. Wherever the orchestra travels, it is divided into two busloads, one called the Saints (for nonsmoking Mormons) and the other the Sinners (for tobacco-loving musicians). The conductor, affectionately nicknamed "Big Mo" by his players, usually travels by car, avoiding any show of favoritism; although a non-Mormon, he is also a nonsmoker. If constant traveling does breed a unique togetherness, it also reveals the peculiar schism between the Mormons and other members of the orchestra. Aboard the Saints' bus, the majority of passengers are women, mostly string players who have been with the orchestra for years. Mormon prayer books are much in evidence, and hymn sing-alongs help to pass time. With the Sinners, it is not only smokier: the passengers are predominantly men, many new to the orchestra, and the talk tends to gripes about six-hour bus rides to play a concert and union negotiations with management. The Sinners are aware that the Saints consider them irreverent. "The Mormons really think they are superior people," says a Sinner cellist. "They are polite to us and pleasant enough, but we really don't mingle with them at all." The biggest difference between the two buses is the attitude toward the Maestro. To the Saints, Abravanel is a revered father figure. To the Sinners, he is a typical conductor--a dictator touched with fanaticism.

Not all that typical. On his 60th birthday, Abravanel announced to his orchestra that he was giving them the right to fire him at any time, by vote on a secret ballot. "I have seen too many of my colleagues in the arts who do not know when to quit. It is really a sad thing to witness, and I am determined that this will not be my fate." That is not to say that Maurice Abravanel would like to be voted out. "Our reward for this hard traveling is the reaction of a small-town audience when it hears a symphony orchestra for the first time," he says. "If I could choose how and where to die, I would like it to happen while conducting my orchestra in a place like Dillon, Montana."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.