A Choice & an Echo

The great outdoors does things to people. Stuffy board chairmen, foggy professors, bleary barflies are all likely to step out of character under a wide and starry sky. Musicians, too. On the podium of Boston's austere Symphony Hall, Conductor Erich Leinsdorf, for instance, is as musically adventurous as a metronome. But amid the shadowed lawns and towering pinewoods of Tanglewood at Lenox, Mass., where the Berkshire Music Festival has been held for 27 summers, Leinsdorf the precisionist gives way to a gay experimenter.

His latest experiment is a seldom-heard piece by Mozart--who in composing it might have been affected by the breezes of Salzburg's Mirabell Palace gardens. Serenade ("Notturno") for Four Orchestras consists of make-believe echoes, in which a short statement by the first orchestra is repeated in turn by the other three, each abbreviating the phrase until the fourth sounds only a faint fragment of it--just as an echoed shout fades out in the distance.

Timing & Fading. Orchestra Number One was on the stage in the Tanglewood shed under the maestro's baton; Two and Three were on the shed floor at either side of the stage; Four ended up nearly out of sight under a canopy normally used by the audience to walk from the parking lot to the shed. Four's conductor, English Horn Player Louis Speyer, had a closed-circuit TV screen in front of him to show him Conductor Leinsdorf, and earphones, which gave him the beat of the other orchestras.

The first problem was getting the "echoes" to come in on time. If each conductor waited to hear his cue, there would be too much of a time lag and resulting chaos. To make it come out right, the conductors had to learn to get their orchestras going just the right number of beats before they heard their cue. And when that was perfected, there came the problem of achieving the fading effect. Mozart, with probably a small garden in mind, had scored each "orchestra" as a string quartet with two horns. This did not work in Tangle-wood's 6,000-seat arena. The problem was finally solved by beefing up Orchestra One to 26 pieces, giving Two 15, Three 9, and Four 13. All strings were muted in Four, three-quarters of them in Three, half in Two. Leinsdorf's orchestra played full strength.

Mapping the Campaign. The Serenade for Four Orchestras played before the biggest crowd of the season--14,592--but the drawing card was Van Cliburn as soloist in the main body of the program. When Serenade's opening statement in the Number One orchestra ended and the echoes began, everybody looked surprised, and there was much craning of necks to locate the elusive Four. In 18 minutes it was over, and the audience gave it a warm round of applause, but no accolade. Said one female Cliburnite to a colleague: "What the hell was that?"

But the orchestra loved it, and so did Leinsdorf. "I was very anxious about the whole thing, really, but it turned out delightfully," he said later in his dressing room. "It was more like mapping out a campaign than conducting an orchestra."

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