Word: conductor
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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...
...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...
...Antal Dorati, 54, decided to call it quits after eleven years with the Minneapolis Symphony, plans to spend the next two or three years as a freelance conductor, mostly in Europe. A vigorous orchestra builder (he virtually remade the Dallas Symphony between 1945 and 1948), Hungarian-born Dorati took over the Minneapolis from Dimitri Mitropoulos in 1948, extended the orchestra's repertory and season, but now feels that he can push the orchestra no further. Says Dorati blandly: "An artist of my caliber-and I am one of the best-must always be building." Replacing Dorati in Minneapolis...
...Leopold Stokowski, 78, closed out his fifth season as conductor of the Houston Symphony by praising Manager Thomas Johnson as "a man who can get along with a difficult conductor like me," then announced that he will leave his Texas podium next year. Generally liked in Houston, Stokowski was occasionally criticized, first for pushing too many modern works, then for moving in the opposite direction and pandering to the city's "roast beef appetite." Nevertheless, the city got a good financial return on Stokowski's reported $35,000 annual salary: ticket sales increased 86%. So far, no successor...