Composer-Conductor-Fiddler

Most symphonic conductors limit their public activity to conducting. It has been hinted that some are not good enough musicians to do anything else. A few, like the late Ossip Gabrilowitsch and the contemporary Jose Iturbi, have been even more famed as instrumental soloists than as orchestral maestros. Still fewer can, like Germany's Richard Strauss, combine the abilities of a brilliant conductor with those of an eminent composer. Burly, slope-shouldered Rumanian Georges Enesco, who replaced John Barbirolli last week as guest conductor of New York's Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, is probably the only famous musical figure today who is equally noted as a composer, a conductor and a soloist.

Last week, while the Philharmonic's pudgy head violinist, Mishel Piastro, laid down his fiddle and picked up the baton to conduct the orchestral accompaniment, Conductor Enesco laid down his baton and picked up a fiddle to play the solo. Carnegie Hall's audience and the critical pundits found his fiddling in Bach's Concerto in A Minor for Violin and String Orchestra the last word in intelligent interpretation. Composer Enesco will again play a double part on next week's Philharmonic programs when he conducts his own Rumanian Rhapsody No. i.

Difficult to pigeonhole as a musician, Enesco is equally difficult to pigeonhole in the various jobs at which he works. In spite of an absorbing interest in contemporary modernistic scores, he shines brightest as a conductor of romantic German symphonies. As a composer he cannot be identified with any school. "People have been puzzled and annoyed," said good-natured, courtly Enesco in an interview, ''because they have been unable to catalog and classify me in the usual way. They could not decide exactly what type of music mine was. It was not French, after the manner of Debussy, it was not exactly German. That, I feel sure, comes from the fact that my musical education was not confined to one locality."

Born in Rumania, Enesco studied composition, piano, organ, cello, violin in Vienna, became a violinist in a Viennese Symphony Orchestra. Later he went to Paris, entered the Paris Conservatoire, studied more composition, more violin, composed extensively and had his compositions widely performed. Today, at the age of 56, Enesco is almost as familiar a figure to the Parisians and the Viennese as to the Rumanians, who regard him as their musical patron saint.

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