Homemade Maestros

It has never happened before: two U.S. conductors are preparing to take over the leadership of two first-rank U.S. symphony orchestras.

With a three-year contract in his pocket, Alfred Wallenstein is in Manhattan finishing off his summer broadcasts as WOR's musical director, signing up soloists who will appear with him next winter. In November he will raise his baton over the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Karl Krueger, who resigned last April after ten years' leadership of the Kansas City Philharmonic, announced that he had also found a bigger job. In October Conductor Krueger will head the revived * and reorganized Detroit Symphony.

While U.S.-born and U.S.-trained musicians have been rated high as violinists, cellists, pianists and opera singers, no U.S. maestro has so far reached international fame as a symphony conductor."This scarcity of important U.S. maestros has long kept U.S. critics and concertgoers guessing. Commonest rationalizations : 1) Americans lack the dictatorial temperament characteristic of men like Toscanini, Stokowski, Koussevitzky ; 2) the U.S. lacks bush-league opera houses and symphony orchestras such as provide European maestros with experience.

Europe's Magic Touch. But struggling U.S. maestros think the trouble is just snobbish lack of admiration for native talent. They point to an undeniable fact: U.S. symphony orchestras frequently pass up American conductors for colorful Europeans who have neither outstanding talent nor great experience. (Even the undeniably gifted Leopold Stokowski had only conducted a symphony orchestra once or twice before in his life, when, in 1909, he was appointed chief of the Cincinnati Symphony.) San Francisco-born Alfred Wallenstein and Kansas-born Karl Krueger lack neither talent nor experience. Wallenstein started his career as an infant-prodigy cellist at the age of six, toured South America as a side show with the late great Anna Pavlova, studied in Germany with famed Cellist Julius Klengel.

When he returned to the U.S. at 24, he was the finest of all U.S. cellists and one of the half-dozen best in the world. But Cellist Wallenstein stuck to orchestra playing, played for seven years with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony as first cellist for his intimate friend and patron, Arturo Toscanini. When Toscanini resigned from the Philharmonic in 1936, Wallenstein resigned too.

The Beat of the Master. He took with him a knowledge of symphonic conducting based on a careful study of every flick of Toscanini's baton. After Wallenstein was appointed musical director of Station WOR, discriminating listeners began to notice a Toscanini polish and precision in WOR's Sinfonietta. Even today Alfred Wallenstein, with a passion for clarity and neatness and a curious paddling beat, conducts like a carbon copy of Arturo Toscanini.

Suave, cigar-puffing Karl Krueger, a more leisurely type of man, conducts like a carbon copy of the late Arthur Nikisch, who picked him up 27 years ago, when he was studying law in Vienna, and made him his protege. Krueger was also a cellist, but not so good as Wallenstein. He had also studied organ and composition. Nikisch got him a job as an assistant conductor with the Vienna Opera, where he boned up on conducting with such eminent Austrians as Franz Schalk and Felix Weingartner. In 1925 he returned to the U.S. to take over the Seattle Symphony, left it six years later for the biggest job of his life so far: organizing (in the midst of the depression) the Kansas City Philharmonic. So successful was Krueger as an organizer that he ended by putting Kansas City on the musical map.

Last week it began to look as if U.S. maestros would be good enough for the big league after all.

* Last fall, the Detroit Symphony became the first war casualty among U.S. symphony orchestras (TIME, Oct. 19). A weekly radio broadcast sponsored by Sam's Cut-Rate Inc. kept the orchestra alive. Now, under broader sponsorship, the Detroit Symphony has convalesced.

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