Conducting for Fun

When Efrem Zimbalist, aged 12, was the youngest member of a Russian opera orchestra, he won two rubles one day at rehearsal by taking a baton and conducting a score from memory. After a rich career as a violin virtuoso Efrem Zimbalist waved a baton again last week, not for rubles this time but to help the Russian singers who lately distinguished themselves in the Cleveland Orchestra's presentation of Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (TIME, Feb. 11)

The Russian singers who incorporated themselves last winter as "The Art of Musical Russia" chose Tchaikovsky's Eugen Onegin as the first of their five operas to be given in Manhattan. Because Tchaikovsky never developed a true sense of the theatre, the performance perforce ambled along leisurely. Set arias had definite melodic appeal and the singers did as well as they could under the handicap of the poor acoustics in makeshift Mecca Temple. For a conductor making his debut, Efrem Zimbalist worked wonders with a miscellaneous orchestra picked from the unemployed by the Musicians' Emergency Aid. Zimbalist's beat was clean and sure. His gestures were neither cramped nor exaggerated. He behaved, as always, like a true musician, absorbed in a score with which he was thoroughly acquainted.

For his supper after the performance, Zimbalist asked for meatballs and noodles. When friends wanted to know whether he was ambitious to go on conducting, he grinned his wide grin, said that his first experience had been fun.

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