Pianist on Podium

A pudgy little man in a grey pullover sweater stepped up on the dais at the Philadelphia Academy of Music one day last week and. bracing his shaking knees, picked up a baton to rehearse the proud Philadelphia Orchestra. The players greeted him politely but on many a stony face was a look of dark suspicion. They were tired of guest conductors and this one was a pianist. But Jose Iturbi also used to be a boxer and he would not be glared down. He smiled a disarming smile and set the musicians to work with the authority of their own Stokowski.*Before the rehearsal was half over every last one of them knew, that the little Spaniard on the podium meant business.

Not until last spring when he went to Mexico City did the world realize that Jose Iturbi's ambition reached higher than the piano. There he gave 15 recitals in three weeks and still the Mexicans wanted more. He itched to try conducting. Because there was no assembled orchestra available he put an advertisement in the newspapers. For his first Mexican concert he hired 40 players. By the time he reached the 29th concert he had no musicians under his baton. When he returned to New York in the summer he conducted the Philharmonic in the Stadium series (TIME, Aug. 21). Twice the audience rose to cheer him. But Iturbi well knew when he went to Philadelphia that a formal winter engagement would be a stiffer test, that success depended largely on the response of the men at rehearsals.

Marvel to the players as rehearsals proceeded was that a conductor with such brief experience had memorized each detail of the music so perfectly, that by listening to orchestras, reading over pocket scores in trains, at meals, in bed, he had developed such clear ideas on the meaning of each phrase and nuance. First thing he did was to reseat the orchestra, putting the first violins on one side, the second violins on the other, to hear two distinct voices instead of one massed tone. Next he instructed the fiddlers to make their bows move as one, whether Stokowski fussed about such things or not. The Mozart-Kleine Nacht Musik started off too delicately to suit him. "Excuse me," he shouted. "It is too fairy. Mozart was very man." He imitated perfectly the sounds he wanted from the English horn, the double bass, the flute. The men's respect mounted until some were calling him the next Toscanini. But Iturbi wanted no adulation. "Please," he repeated frequently. "The music! I am not genius."

At the public performance Iturbi merely clenched his baton a little tighter and with the simplest of gestures led the men on to do what he had taught them at rehearsal. But the music was so articulate, the Mozart so sparkling, the Rhenish Symphony of Schumann so gravely romantic, that in intermission the lobby was abuzz with the talk of this coming young conductor. The program went on with Debussy's La Mer, the Intermezzo from Granados' Goyescas, three dances from De Falla's Three-Cornered Hat. At the end the audience was on its feet cheering. The players stamped their feet, beat excitedly on their music racks.

For Iturbi's repeat performance there was still greater enthusiasm. When he left the Academy a big crowd gathered at the stage-door to get a glimpse of him. Whatever his success as a conductor Iturbi claims that he will never turn his back on the keyboard. Said he last week to Schima Kaufman, one of the Orchestra's violinists who writes for the Philadelphia Record: "I will never give up the piano. If I could whistle or sing I would do so too. I adore the orchestra, but I am not stick-crazy."

*Stokowski has been taking a midwinter vacation in California, where he just finished building a studio in the Toro Canyon, near Santa Barbara.

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