Fish & Moderns

For most of the summer, Fish Creek (winter pop. 450), on the Wisconsin shore of Green Bay, is merely a scrubbed, pine-scented resort for well-heeled vacationers and fishermen. But for two weeks each August, the little town's white frame hotels are crowded with tourists, and the high school volleys forth provocative music expertly played. Last week the fifth Peninsula Music Festival was in full " swing in Fish Creek; as usual, it featured a bumper crop of modern premieres--half a dozen in two weeks.

The man who runs the Peninsula Festival, the Cincinnati Symphony's energetic Conductor Thor Johnson, 44, tries to present "musical experiences that are not included in wintertime concerts anywhere in the world." Audiences heard the 42-man orchestra wheel through freshly performed American music, including the wisecracking, four-movement Divertimento Burlesca by Los Angeles' Benjamin Lees, 32, and the sprightly Three Songs for Bass and Orchestra by Chicago's late Edward Collins. As a counterpoint to such commissioned modern works, Conductor Johnson offered some elegant, rarely performed echoes of the 18th century; the Sinfonia Concertante in E-Flat, by Johann Christian Bach (youngest son of J.S.B.), the Partita in A Major for Viola and Orchestra, by French Composer Louis de Caix d'Hervelois.

Lunchtime Conversion. Just as surprising as such programs is the fact that the Fish Creek audiences do not seem to miss the standard festival war horses --the ones Johnson fondly refers to as "the old guys." Not long after Johnson took over the Peninsula Festival five years ago, a local matron murmured to him: "Next summer we won't have any more of this, will we?"

"Yes," he said amiably. "We will."

Since then, Conductor Johnson has continued to plug modern music, plus rarely performed classical programs, with the same zeal in Fish Creek that he shows in Cincinnati. Once, after receiving a note from a concertgoer scolding him for playing Bartok, he took the man to lunch, gradually converted him--as he converted many of his audiences. But he is still disturbed by the opposition he occasionally encounters. "The tragedy of the contemporary music scene is people's lack of humility in the presence of art. The public has become such an authority; right away it's good; it's bad; pass it off."

On the Grass. A native of Wisconsin, Johnson organized his first orchestra when he was 13 ("If no one is going to give you an orchestra, you have to go out and make one"). By the time he took over the Cincinnati in 1947, he had formed half a dozen of. his own orchestras, had also put in a teaching stint at the University of Michigan. To put together his Fish Creek outfit he raided virtually every major orchestra in the U.S. In five seasons Johnson has conducted no fewer than 15 world premieres and eleven U.S. premieres.

This summer, as usual, the people of Fish Creek turned out to honor the orchestra and Conductor Johnson at an annual feature: the festival fish boil, held on a spur of grassy land jutting into the lake. It seemed to prove that people would buy the new guys as well as the old--if they were sold right.

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