Mitty Maestro

Conductor Bergen Who?

It is one of the strangest musical customs in New York City. Three or four times a year, Charlotte Bergen, a wealthy recluse from Bernardsville, N.J., rents Carnegie Hall and conducts a free concert. She hires the American Symphony Orchestra and various soloists, gets out her 2-ft.-long baton and mounts the podium as maestro for the day--paying some $40,000 for the Mittyesque experience. She has no formal training in conducting. Also she is a frail woman of 81 encumbered with a heavy back brace.

But when Bergen stepped slowly out onstage and gave the downbeat for her latest concert, she was greeted with the respect due a serious musician both by members of the symphony and old fans in the 2,800-member, capacity audience.

Bergen proved to be no Solti on the podium--she gave few entrance or dynam ic cues--but she kept the symphony marching along smartly to her emphatic beat through the Brahms and Schumann program. It was good, solid music, capped with a rousing run through a Brahms' Hungarian Dance that had the audience clapping along in approval. Said one musician: "She does amazingly well at get ting the continuity and the overall interpretation right."

If Bergen has realized the great dream of amateur conductors everywhere, she owes it to her money as well as to her art. Her mother was a Gardiner (the clan that has owned a private island off Long Island since 1639). She grew up in a 23-room mansion on her family's estate --where she still lives--and was raised on cello lessons, parlor musical soirees and concerts at Carnegie Hall.

At tunes, watching Toscanini conduct, she recalls wondering, "How would it feel to wave that little stick around?"

But the will to conduct came only a decade ago, after her Roman Catholic parish church asked her help in improving its choir. "Gradually," she says, "I became aware that one could put instruments together with the choir and produce wider horizons of sound." She fell in love with the ability to create that rich sound, so much more dramatic than her single cello line. The next step was to try her hand with a symphony. That decided, she never thought twice about Carnegie Hall.

Says she: "It has the acoustics, the tradition, my childhood memories--everything right there."

After her concerts, Bergen greets well-wishers backstage; about 5,000 fans are on her mailing list for concert information; 4,300 requested tickets for this concert. "God bless you," some tell her. "See you next time," she replies. Then she heads back to New Jersey with her nurse, full-time companion and chauffeur.

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