Hard Sell in Seattle

When he steps from the podium next season after leading the Seattle Symphony in the premiere of a piano concerto by Leon Kirchner, Conductor Milton Katims will stop at' the Orpheum movie theater. There, before an audience of symphony patrons, he will engage the soloist of the evening, Pianist Leon Fleisher, in a three-game pingpong match. Katims may lose, for Fleisher has a widely feared forehand slam, but he expects to collect about $10,000 from spectators for the symphony's sustaining fund.

In the European tradition of Fritz Reiner or Bruno Walter, a pingpong postlude to a concerto would seem outrageous. Katims is a different breed of conductor who, like Lenny Bernstein, combines a showman's flair with an artist's discipline and knows that, despite the enormously increased U.S. appetite for culture, good programs must still be promoted. Says he: "No American conductor can expect simply to wrap himself in an opera cloak and make music."

The Showman. To raise money for his orchestra, Katims appears at fashion shows and candlelight musicales. at "Meet the Maestro'' luncheons and "Sympho-neve" dances. He has been known to turn his baton over in midconcert to civic-minded businessmen and, in one case, to a seven-year-old child. To warm an audience up, he may crack jokes between numbers or invite it to join him in singing The Star-Spangled Banner. Last week hard-selling Conductor Katims staged a concert titled "Composium Nineteen-Sixty," featuring works of five resident Seattle composers. Most of the works were pleasantly melodic exercises, more impressive for technique than for originality. But the concert was both a popular success and a major boost to Seattle's civic pride.

For all his showmanship, Brooklyn-born Milton Katims. 50, is a solidly gifted musician who has given Seattle the best orchestra in its somewhat chaotic music history. A first-rate violist. Katims played in the NBC Symphony under Toscanini for ii years, and studied the Toscanini technique. In rehearsal he is still given to shouting Arturo-isms: "Dream with me!" and "Make it barbaric!" The Dustman. When Katims arrived in Seattle in 1954, the city was still trying to forget its last permanent conductor, France's Manuel Rosenthal, who was for bidden re-entry to the U.S. in 1951 for perjuring himself to the effect that the woman traveling with him was his wife.

Nor had the city yet fully recovered from the blasts of Sir Thomas Beecham, who in 1941 had proclaimed Seattle "an esthetic dustbin" (he has similarly complimented many other U.S. cities).

Katims began winning converts by put ting on children's and family concerts, en couraging and lecturing to musical study groups, offering "balanced" programs ranging from Rossini's Semiramide Over ture to Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra.

He established a "little symphony" to play rare music -- both ancient and mod ern -- extended the symphony's subscription series from 8 to 22 concerts, tripled both the budget and the total season at tendance. The Seattle Symphony now includes 85 musicians, nearly a third of them women; the majority have to hold other, daytime jobs (aircraft engineer, longshoreman, school bus driver) to supplement their $2,000 pay; many teach music. Above all, Katims introduced 75 works never before played in Seattle, e.g., Orff's Carmina Burana, Mahler's monumental Resurrection Symphony, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast.

The dust from the dustbin, notes one symphony board member, has long since settled into Puget Sound. With such results, what's a little pingpong between friends?

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