Word: concertos
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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...
...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...
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...
...interested," says Alan Hovhaness, "only in serenity of the mind." In his search for it, Composer Hovhaness is traveling around the world, and during the trip-working in railway coaches, airplanes, steamy hotel rooms-he has serenely turned out four symphonies, one opera, a concerto and four piano pieces. Last week in Tokyo he displayed some of the fruits of serenity to warmly applauding Japanese...
...wrote one Japanese critic, "are like Japanese scrolls. As they are rolled out, they reveal new images and their message bit by bit. Western classical music in comparison is like a photographic print." Japanese audiences heard Hovhaness conduct several of his older works-Psalm and Fugue, the 28-minute Concerto No. 8-plus two brand-new works written in transit: Symphony No. 8, subtitled "Arjuna," after the name of a mythical hero from Indian folklore; and the choral piece Fuji (based on an 8th century Japanese poem beginning: "As I stepped out on the beach of Tago, I saw snow...