Bernstein in Palestine

A concert soothed the savage breast of Jerusalem last week. Only a small percentage of the hundreds who besieged the big, bare movie house, Edison Hall, in the Holy City could get in. When the concert started, 15 minutes late, hundreds stood in the aisles and the passageways.

It was the first appearance in Palestine of Manhattan's brilliant young (28) Conductor Leonard Bernstein (TIME, Feb. 24), whose admirers have made him a kind of Sinatra of symphony. But he had never seen anything like this. Partly the ovation was Jewish pride in him: the audience was all Jewish--not a single British soldier, policeman or government official was there.

When he walked onto the platform in awkward, quick steps, Bernstein was greeted by waves of applause that didn't subside until, just as awkwardly, he turned around and lifted his hands to begin Schumann's Symphony No. 2. Some said the ovation overshadowed the greeting given Toscanini when he conducted the orchestra's first concert in 1936.

Bernstein conducted without a baton, frequently humming or singing with the orchestra. The second work was his own Jeremiah Symphony. The score of it had gone astray somewhere between Athens, Cairo and Jerusalem. Another copy arrived by air only three days before the concert. But Bernstein got the yoman orchestra through it deftly. That called for five bows. Then he played the solo part of Ravel's Piano Concerto, conducting from the piano. Some of the more critical in the audience thought they had heard better performances, but if Bernstein had played Pop! Goes the Weasel, the audience would have loved him just as much.

Next day, dressed in slacks and sports coat after a swim in the Dead Sea, Bernstein told newsmen exuberantly: "The Palestine Orchestra is potentially one of the greatest in the world. It should make a trip to the States next fall, but first it needs two solid months of real hard work under a single conductor." He gazed dreamily out of the window of Jerusalem's modernistic Eden Hotel and mused, "I hope I can be the guy to pull that off."

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