Conductor in Waiting

Alexander Hilsberg is a man who knows how to bide his time. For 25 years he played his violin in the Philadelphia Orchestra, the last 19 as concertmaster. Most of that time, he was wishing he were a conductor. Says patient Alex Hilsberg: "Each man must wait his call."

Hilsberg's first important call came in 1946, when he substituted for ailing Eugene Ormandy in a Carnegie Hall concert, and made a hit with the tough Manhattan critics. By last week, 51-year-old Alex Hilsberg was a full-fledged, and very busy, conductor.

He started off the week leading the NBC Symphony (in Toscanini's absence). Next day, he conducted his own Reading (Pa.) Symphony. Then he raced up to Worcester, Mass, to lead the Philadelphia Orchestra, of which he is associate conductor. He finished the week by taking the NBC again. Altogether, he went through five programs with three orchestras, to say nothing of eleven rehearsals.

Alex Hilsberg thinks the waiting did him good. After 25 years spent scraping an acquaintance with the classics, he shuns "interpretations" of them, finds his greatest satisfaction (as does Toscanini) in clean and powerful renderings of what the composer wrote. NBC listeners last week found that even Dvorak's done-to-death "New World" Symphony sounded fresh and clear.

Hilsberg got his early violin training in the same St. Petersburg prodigy factory that turned out Heifetz and Milstein. But he has no regrets that he did not contiue a career of concert fiddling. "I could Vt stand up there and play again and again the Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Brahms [concerti]. That is like being a painter and being handed a palette with only a few colors. Conducting, you have all the colors you could possibly want."

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