Youth, Age and Stokowski

Last week Leopold Stokowski--while setting out with an All-American Youth Orchestra to tour 45 cities in the U. S., Canada, Mexico--was mentioned as successor to international music's "Old Man" --Arturo Toscanini--at the baton of the great and costly NBC Symphony. The reason was that Maestro Toscanini, up to last week, had kept strictly mum about his future plans, and the NBC Symphony was badly in need of a great conductor.

Toscanini has agreed to conduct six concerts in Buenos Aires this summer, at the Teatro Colon, whose orchestra and operatic productions are South America's finest. Thus the Old Man is not too old (74) or tired to carry on, as some of his friends have suggested. But he is disturbed about the state of the world, and reluctant to enter on long-term commitments. Manhattan's Philharmonic-Symphony wished to hire him to help celebrate its forthcoming 100th birthday. But its subscription concerts have by now been allotted to nine conductors,* and special performances would have to be arranged for Maestro Toscanini.

NBC is finding its Symphony a painful subject. It built the orchestra, now one of the world's finest, for prestige. It spends on it nearly a quarter of the $2,165,000 it lays out annually for music. Yet the NBC Symphony's audience has never been enormous; it had about 4,500,000 listeners this year, half as many as CBS's Philharmonic broadcasts and NBC's Metropolitan Opera. Moreover, Toscanini's salary--$4,000 per broadcast, with income taxes paid--might well cost NBC another $5,000 under new tax schedules. The maestro has often been difficult to handle, especially in regard to rehearsals, which sometimes have conflicted with other studio jobs which the Symphony men are supposed to fill.

If NBC is obliged to drop its Blue network, as FCC has demanded, it may not be able to find a spot for its expensive hour-and-a-half symphonic program. In any case it may not be able to get a conductor of the caliber of Toscanini or Stokowski. Last week, in the face of these many painful ifs, NBC said merely that the Symphony would continue.

* John Barbirolli (the Philharmonic's contracted conductor), Boston's Serge Koussevitzky, Cincinnati's Eugene Goossens, Minneapolis' Dimitri Mitropoulos, German Exiles Bruno Walter and Fritz Busch, Cleveland's Artur Rodzinski, Philadelphia's Stokowski, Manhattan's Walter Damrosch.

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