Philharmonic's Start

'Had a transatlantic liner brought into New York harbor last week a swart little man with a waxed mustache and a hat several sizes too small, photographers would have rushed out to Quarantine and presently crowds would have lined up for the opening of the Philharmonic-Symphony. Those who got in would have stood in their seats and yelled for Arturo Toscanini.

But he was resting in Italy last week, a grandfather. Until Jan. 21 brings the excitement of his return, guest conductors must lead the Philharmonic. The one to begin the season last week was Otto Klemperer, the 6-ft. 4-in. German who, even though he used no podium, towered over the Orchestra like a dark fierce-eyed giant.

New Yorkers remembered Klemperer for his height, for the flyaway gestures he used when he conducted the old New York Symphony in 1926 and 27. Those visits were brief, were no fair test. Back in Berlin he became director of the Berlin Staatsoper and six years later a martyr. Nazi youths pummeled him. When his contract had four years to run Adolf Hitler repudiated it because he was a Jew.

Los Angeles heard the mature Klemperer last winter and Los Angeles pronounced him great for his Beethoven, his Brahms. He still looked like a dark, fanatic prophet but he had modified his gestures save for stirring climaxes when he jerked his head so violently that his ill-fitting glasses kept falling down his nose.

Last week in Manhattan even the spectacles behaved. (He had bought new pairs.) His first performance was painstaking, tensely sincere. But his program was difficult for an audience which wanted to begin the season with music it knew well and loved. The Philharmonic engaged Klemperer to be "spokesman for the internationally modern composer." And true to his calling he played Schoenberg's gilded transcription of Bach's E Flat Prelude and Fugue and Sibelius' stark Second Symphony.

Critics paid most attention to ultra-modern Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, a symphony supposed to describe a triptych painted by Mathias Gruenewald in the 16th Century. Hindemith in writing it had worked himself into a mystical mood, produced occasional passages of eerie loveliness. Critics praised his craftsmanship, his few concessions to melody. Laymen were glad for intermission, impatient for January, Toscanini & Beethoven.

For the orchestramen there is only one maestro. They called Otto Klemperer "O. K."

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