Younger than Springtime

The old lady is 79; the old man is nearly 70. They have been courting each other every spring for the past 34 years. But to tradition-steeped Bos ton, the match is as youthful as ever. The town turns out when the red neon sign atop Symphony Hall blinks Pops, Pops, and Conductor Arthur Fiedler signals the first, firm downbeat to his first love, the Boston Pops Orchestra.

On the gladiola-banked Pops podium last week, the silver-maned maestro, who is celebrating his first half-century with the Boston Symphony, proved once more that in a city which demands the best in music, his fizzy Pops concerts are the perfect spring tonic. The formula is familiar: two parts classical and semiclassical to one part popular--plus a dash of the unexpected.

Fiedler puts things together with an unerring knack for creative programing and a repertory of close to a thousand selections from Bach to Chubby Checker. With exuberant ease, the maestro and 90 members from the Bos ton Symphony Orchestra achieve what many of their imitators are still striving for--popularity for Pops.

Headier Stuff. Shoehorned into green-and-gilt chairs at dime-sized tables, last week's audience snacked on ham sand wiches, strawberry sundaes, champagne, beer, pink "Pops punch" and Fiedler's musical buffet--everything from a glass-rattling Sousa march ("to get everybody's attention") to a Mendelssohn concerto, a Strauss waltz, a Weber overture and a splash of lushly orchestrated show tunes. For surprise encores Vaudevillian Fiedler uncorked a brassy, off Beatle I Want to Hold Your Hand complete with handclapping and nasal chorus of "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" from the string section, and a breezy Hello, Dolly! punctuated with the wheeee of a child's slide whistle and the oooga oooga of a Klaxon horn.

"You've got to 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.

For all his 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.

An 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.

The future? "Fifty more years," he says grandly, professing again his allegiance to Rossini's credo: " 'Every kind of music is good--except the boring kind.' "

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