Pit to Podium

The U.S. lend-leased a symphony conductor to the Commonwealth of Australia this week. He was the Philadelphia Orchestra's chunky, barrel-chested Maestro Eugene Ormandy. The lease was arranged (through OWI) at the request of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which expects Ormandy to conduct at least 18 symphony concerts in big Australian cities, as many Australian army camps as he can reach in ten weeks of touring.

The Australian Broadcasting Commission tapped Conductor Ormandy because he is: 1) one of the youngest (44) and most energetic of first-rank U.S. maestros; 2) in the twelve years he has spent conducting the Minneapolis and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, Ormandy has rolled up a radio following comparable to that of such symphonic bigwigs as Serge Koussevitzky and Arturo Toscanini; 3) he has made more phonograph recordings than any other living maestro except Leopold Stokowski.

Up from Gangdom. Hungarian-born Eugene Ormandy is the only important U.S. conductor who ever climbed from the pit of a Broadway movie house. The climb began in 1920 when Ormandy, then a moderately gifted European concert violinist, arrived in Manhattan with a contract for a $30,000 concert tour, found that both the $30,000 and the impresario had vanished. Ormandy was down to his last nickel when he landed a job with the late Samuel L. (Roxy) Rothafel, who set him to fiddling in the last row of the second violin section at Broadway's Capitol Theater. Ormandy played second fiddle so well that he was soon solo violinist of the original Roxy Gang. He graduated from gangdom when the Capitol's chief conductor fell ill on the eve of a performance. Ormandy, the only musician in the place who knew the Tchaikovsky score by heart, took over on 15 minutes' notice. It was the first time in his life that he had ever conducted.

Absolute Suicide. One fine night Impresario Arthur Judson, Mr.Big of the U.S. concert world, snapped him up as one of the chief maestros of the Judson Radio Program Corp., later a part of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Three years afterward, when Toscanini backed out of a two-weeks' engagement with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Impresario Judson offered the thankless job to Ormandy. Said Judson: "I think it is absolute suicide." Ormandy clicked at once. Immediate result: he was appointed chief conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony. After five years in Minneapolis, Ormandy went to Philadelphia, eventually succeeded Stokowski as chief conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the four big U.S. conducting jobs.*

* The others: the Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic-Symphony and NBC Symphony orchestras.

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