Dodger Symphony

One starlit night four years ago, in the ruins of Santa Cruz Church, the Manila Symphony Orchestra gave its first concert since the Japanese invasion. In the audience were eight G.I.s from Brooklyn who never forgot the concert or its conductor: Vienna-born Dr. Herbert Zipper, who had survived Hitler's Dachau and Buchenwald, and two of Tojo's Philippine hellholes.

A year later, back home in Brooklyn, they heard that Conductor Zipper was in the U.S. on a cultural mission for the Philippines. They buttonholed him with a proposition: if they could form a Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, would he stay and conduct it? Said 45-year-old Herbert Zipper: "They were so earnest . . . besides, it was a creative challenge." He stayed.

A Crusty Warning. His eager organizers knew what they were up against. Some 13,000 of New York City's 31,500 musicians live in Brooklyn, but still Brooklyn had never been able to keep an orchestra going. Its first, started in 1857,* had been one of the U.S.'s first. It folded in 1891, when famed German-born Conductor Theodore Thomas left it to become the Chicago Symphony's first conductor.

In 1941, by then more famous for its blatant baseball than its Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, Brooklyn tried a professional orchestra once more. Asked to guest-conduct, famed Sir Thomas Beecham accepted with a crusty warning: "I am not prepared to transform your community overnight into a center of art and enlightenment . . ." In World War II, so many players were drafted that the orchestra collapsed again.

This time, the organizers set out to learn just what Brooklyn wanted. They rang doorbells, stopped citizens on the streets, questioned 8,000 people. Findings: most people who were likely to come and listen wanted two concerts a month and thought a $2 top for tickets about right; only 18% wanted an all-symphonic program. 58% wanted them "usually" symphonic; 75% preferred pianists as soloists; more wanted to hear contraltos than sopranos. But above all, Brooklyn wanted to have opera--at least in concert performance.

A Bright Promise. Last week, opera was among the things they got. For his new Brooklyn Symphony's first concert,

Conductor Zipper had drilled his 86 musicians and some borrowed singers (including the Metropolitan's Regina Resnik) in part I of the fourth act of Verdi's Don Carlos, which had not been performed in New York for 26 years.

On the big night, 2,000 Brooklynites piled into the Academy of Music, cheered for two minutes in sheer local pride before the orchestra even played a note. A well-played Beethoven Fifth had them applauding at the end of each movement, but the Don Carlos brought down the house. Then came a pranking Till Eulenspiegel and (for an encore) one of Conductor Zipper's native Viennese waltzes. Brooklyn loved it. Breathed perspiring Conductor Zipper: "I'm so grateful. . ."

It was just a starter. The Brooklyn Symphony was playing only twice this season. But, beamed one Brooklynite: "As they say at Ebbets Field, wait till next year."

* Only the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, founded in 1842, was older.

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