Americans Abroad

Wherever the Americans went they were greeted as conquering heroes. In Athens they were cheered on to three encores. In Teheran the Shah and his sister put in their own requests (his: Berlioz' Hungarian March; hers: Dvorak's Slavonic

Dances). In Bombay Indians rose for a standing ovation. The cheers were for the 100-piece Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Antal Dorati. 51. Last week, to another ovation in Belgrade, the orchestra wound up a triumphant five weeks' tour of a dozen cities in eight countries from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean.

The Minneapolis had played programs that ranged from Mozart through Bartok to U.S. Composer Henry Cowell's gay, melodic Music for Orchestra 1957, specially composed for the tour. The traveling orchestra had its casualties, but only one musician missed a plane, and he was delivered (to Athens) on a cargo plane in time to make the concert. Spare reeds and strings were plentiful; even the tympani player got around his problem of extremes of humidity by putting the drumheads under a hair drier when they loosened in damp climates and covering them with wet diapers when they got too tight in dry climates.

As much as a third of the orchestra was sick at one time, probably with the Eastern malady known as "Delhi belly," but all performed manfully. At an open-air concert in Baghdad, a band of yelping dogs competed so successfully that at the concert's end Dorati fled from the podium in a huff, a case of dogs beat man.

The enthusiasm of audiences and critics (said the Times of India: "An experience of a lifetime") made sickness and occasional discomfort seem unimportant. Again and again listeners were astonished that such expertly played music could come from a "provincial" U.S. city. At the Karachi concert, Pakistan President Iskander Mirza was so moved that he asked the orchestra to repeat the Pakistani national anthem. Said a State Department official: "They have done more to impress people with the U.S. than anything that has come out of the U.S. since the war."

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