Baton Battle

"We can always find a piano to play, but we have to come from all over the world to Besancon to find an orchestra to conduct." So said New York's Allen Miller, 27, who with 34 other contestants (all under 30) was taking part in Besancon's tenth annual International Competition for Young Conductors. Every summer musicians and music fans journey to the town in eastern France to look over the new podium talent: a prize or honorable mention in the contest usually brings quick success, or at least a job, in the music world.

The meet is a rigorous, three-day affair conducted in the town's Casino movie house and the municipal theater, under a glowering panel of judges headed by France's Composer-Teacher Eugene Bigot. The young maestros must whip a professional orchestra through difficult pieces, noting as they go errors planted along the way to trip them up.

As the competition moved toward the finals last week, a battle shaped up between Poland's Witold Dobrzynski, who startled the audience with a dynamic, expert performance of Beauty and the Beast from Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, and Denmark's Paul Jorgensen, who became an early favorite with his Victor Borge-like humor, which puzzled spectators but intrigued the judges. Wearing a perpetual wry grin, the Dane began his performance by tapping on the rack to silence not the musicians but the judges themselves. For all his humor, he was adept at dodging errors, at one point marched angrily over to an offending bass player, pointing his baton and shouting accusingly. The orchestra later rewarded him with a flawless performance of Beauty and the Beast.

During the final playoff, Dobrzynski floundered badly in a Borodin selection and got lost in Die Fledermaus. When it was Jorgensen's turn, he moved to the podium with the same puzzling grin and waved the orchestra through both pieces without a flaw. During the last test selection--a tricky, untitled tone poem composed by Judge Bigot to tax contestants--Jorgensen drove the orchestra through the score so fast that the string section was glazed with perspiration at the finish. He won first prize hands down. For all his clowning, he had proved himself, in the words of Judge Bigot, "a truly great young conductor.,"

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