Conductor of Moderns

Composer Igor Stravinsky has a fierce distrust of most conductors, especially those who try to conduct his own works. But last week Stravinsky, 76, sat in the balcony of Manhattan's Town Hall and watched benignly while a slim, intense man mounted the podium and launched the first U.S. performance of Stravinsky's most recent score--Threni: Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah. The conductor: Stravinsky's protege Robert Craft, at 35 one of the world's leading interpreters of avant-garde music.

First performed in Venice last fall (TIME, Oct. 6). Threni is a 33-minute work for chorus, orchestra and six solo voices, in which Stravinsky utilizes for the first time all twelve tones of the tone-row technique that he recently adopted. Unrelievedly austere in mood, the work unfolds in a series of canons for two, three and four voices, choral chants, spare snatches of instrumental sound. Merely to cue the onstage forces properly was a tricky task, and Conductor Craft performed it brilliantly. Stabbing with a forefinger, lifting his shoulders in rhythmic shrugs, mouthing the Vulgate text in time with the singers, he shaped a performance of geometric clarity, suffused with a thoroughly moving air of penitential passion.

Secret Life. Craft's affinity for modern music dates back almost as far as he can remember. Born in Kingston. N.Y., into a nonmusical family (his father is a real estate broker), he became a boy soprano in the Episcopal Church when he was six. By the time he was packed off to New York Military Academy at Cornwall, 13-year-old Robert Craft was an avid collector of modern scores, spent his spare time poring over copies of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps and Les Noces, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Says Craft: "I led a kind of secret childhood life."

He served as a trumpeter with Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall orchestra while studying at Juilliard, later formed a professional music group called the Chamber Art Society. In 1947 Stravinsky offered to conduct one of his works for the group. "That's the mystery of my life," says Craft. "I still don't know why he did it." At Stravinsky's invitation, Craft returned with him to Los Angeles as a music secretary, gradually became Stravinsky's professional alter ego.

Admired Rival. Craft has become so familiar with Stravinsky's musical thinking (he meets with him twice a day) that he has conducted the first performances of works such as Agon and In Memoriam Dylan Thomas. Some day he hopes to write a comprehensive book about Stravinsky, "this incredibly fresh man." But, he adds, "It is not yet time; he is not finished."

In Stravinsky's recent development, the disciple may have influenced the master. Craft introduced Stravinsky to the music of the late esoteric atonalist Anton von Webern, and championed the works of the late twelve-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg, who was Stravinsky's most famous rival as a pioneer of modern music. Although for years Stravinsky lived only five miles from Schoenberg in Los Angeles, he had heard none of his music since 1912, made no attempt to meet him, and his name was never mentioned in the Stravinsky household. But in the last decade, Stravinsky has admiringly studied Schoenberg's work, adopted some of his techniques. Craft himself corresponded with him, treasures as a memento a handwritten note in which Schoenberg had reminded himself: "Encourage Craft."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.