Word: fiedler
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Turnabout is fair play, decided bearded New Orleans Jazzman Al Hint, 41. He had cut a disk with the Boston Pops in Symphony Hall, so this time it was Conductor Arthur Fiedler, 69, guesting it high on the revolving stage of Hirt's Bourbon Street hangout. "Where are the other 90 musicians?" Fiedler began, raising his baton, whereupon the six-man combo beat him to the beat by hurtling into Trumpeter's Lullaby. "We only have one rule," Al explained kindly. "The one who finishes first gets to play the ending." Since Fiedler had never really started...
...give people a program that has easy appeal," explains Fiedler, "something for everybody, a great variety of the best music played with love and kisses but never over-gooed. You can't really enjoy something if there is no fun in it." Served up Fiedler fashion, Pops concerts are so much fun that they are booked solid up to a year in advance by such diverse groups as the Democratic Women on Wheels and the Boston Police Department. "Fiedler could conduct six nuns playing the cello and it would be a sellout," claims one Pops musician...
...high jinks, though, Fiedler liberally laces his joy juice with headier stuff from Handel, Frescobaldi, Poulenc and Stravinsky. He delights in proclaiming, "I've been accused of making more friends for music than any other conductor. I have no use for those snobs who look down their noses at everything but the most highbrow music. I'm a serious musician, but I don't want to be classified. I'd be bored doing only symphony music...
Fire Buff. Descendant of a long line of fiddling Fiedlers (his father and two uncles were violinists with the B.S.O.), Arthur studied at Berlin's Royal Academy of Music, joined the Boston Symphony in 1915 and played musical chairs (violin, viola, celesta, piano, organ and percussions) before he founded the open-air Esplanade Concerts in 1929 and began luring up to 20,000 persons across the Arthur Fiedler Bridge to the banks of the Charles River for free concerts. In 1930 he became the first Boston-bred conductor of the Pops...
...irrepressible fire buff, Fiedler indoctrinated his Beacon Hill socialite bride by squiring her to all-night vigils in firehouses, for variety dragged her along on forays with the Boston police. Today the Fiedlers live in a baronial brick mansion in Brookline with their two daughters, a son, and a collection of fire helmets and honorary fire-chief badges from some 90 cities...