PART II Episode 4
This is the final blog episode of excerpts from Anshel Brusilow’s memoir, SHOOT THE CONDUCTOR, written with Robin Underdahl and published by the University of North Texas Press in 2015.
Because our music was beautiful and moved our audiences, we were always supposed to be poker-faced. Who can do that? Especially on those grueling tours. We developed radar, constantly looking for something to amuse us.
We always had a couple of encore pieces at the ready, usually a Bach air or an arioso. Something guaranteed to please. Ormandy had to decide when an encore was required and then work the transition. Often the last piece on the program was something weighty, and he would say to the audience, in his winsome way, “What can we offer you after Tchaikovsky?”
Our cellist Sam Belenko had a sonorous basso voice. Once when Ormandy asked his question of the audience, he got a reply from the orchestra in that deep voice: “NOTHING.” Sam’s head was down, but everyone knew who said it.
Never had Ormandy gotten so honest an answer. He had to know his whole orchestra could barely contain itself. But he pulled out one of the Bachs with a straight face, and we recovered our composure.
We rolled through the country on the train—Chicago, St. Louis, eventually California. Toward the end it seemed like we were playing the Rosenkavalier Suite almost every night. John de Lancie and I found a way to stave off boredom. At the place where a short violin solo interacts with an oboe obbligato, we developed a kind of guessing game. The solo is really just part of a waltz and not written with the intention that the violinist will do anything special with it. But the trip was so long! I would add a little finesse, a little extra seasoning of a different flavor every time. John could see by my bow what I was up to, and he was quick to follow, playing simultaneously with me and matching the flavor.
One thing Ormandy hated above all else was losing his best players to another orchestra. In 1963, our principal cellist Lorne Munroe turned in his resignation so he could join the New York Philharmonic.
“Why on earth would he want to go play up there with that group when he can be in the Philadelphia Orchestra?”
“Can’t imagine, Boss.”
“Find me someone, Anshel.”
“Listen to Bill Stokking in the cellos.”
“Who?”
Well, there were a lot of us in his orchestra; I suppose he forgot some of us. “William Stokking—that guy in the back. Wavy brown hair.”
The next day Bill Stokking played for Ormandy and me. Ormandy turned to me, stunned. “He reminds me of Emanuel Feuermann!” He referred to the cellist who had died twenty years earlier and ascended to reign over cello heaven. I told Bill he’d done well.
A few days later Ormandy was beaming. “You’ll never guess who I got!”
I couldn’t.
“Sammy Mayes! Sucked him right out of Boston.”
One thing Ormandy loved above all else was fleecing another orchestra of its best players. Sammy Mayes was a marvelous cellist. In my head I still revisit playing the gorgeous second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Sammy Mayes and with Gary Graffman at the piano. It’s nicknamed the “triple concerto” because Tchaikovsky does virtually transform it into a concerto for piano, cello, and violin in the second movement. Ten minutes of musical unity and pleasure can last the rest of one’s life.
Bill Stokking lost out there. However, he was to have his day yet. Eventually Ormandy hired him as principal cellist.
I was to conduct a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in their summer home, Robin Hood Dell: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Stravinsky was to be in the audience, and we had a great talk together before the concert.
“Don’t do it the way the others do. They rewrite it to make it easier to conduct. The rhythms are important, and I don’t like them changed. All conductors are guilty of fraud.”
We Philadelphia musicians knew when and where the reviews would show up, and we knew all the local reviewers. The next day a review appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. That was normal. Oddly, I’d never heard of the reviewer. No one else knew her either. She found the concert to be nothing special. Did she not notice the audience’s response?
Stranger yet, the Evening Bulletin had no review at all. Both newspapers always reviewed the orchestra performances.
About a week later James Felton, the Evening Bulletin’s regular music critic, told me what happened.
“Anshel, I’m so sorry! We were all out of town. Our bosses said it was mandatory that we cover the announcement in Saratoga Springs.” He was speaking for all the regular music critics of the Philadelphia newspapers, and I appreciated his candor. What he explained was that every music critic had had to attend a press conference 270 miles away. “The board” of the Philadelphia Orchestra was announcing the orchestra’s new plans for a summer festival. It had to be announced at the future location of the festival, not in Philadelphia. And although it was two years in the future, the announcement could not be given at any other time except the evening when I was conducting The Rite of Spring.
“I don’t know who the young woman was who reviewed your concert,” James Felton said. “But I do know that she was told just how to write it up.”
Of course every musician knew that Ormandy was behind the board’s press conference. He had the newspapers in his back pocket. The lesson I was supposed to be learning was that it was dangerous to conduct in his city.
Sometimes Ormandy wanted to get rid of a player. For years he weeded out those who had played under Stokowski. Luckily for me, my dear assistant concertmaster, Dave Madison, had an engaging personality that kept him off Ormandy’s shit list. Few others from the Stokowski era were exempt.
“I want to move So-and-so farther back,” Ormandy would occasionally say. “He’s not pulling his weight.”
Knowing how random personality traits could annoy him, I almost always objected to these demotions, and most of the time he deferred to my judgment. I never told the players.
Once he fixed in his crosshairs a player in the back of the second violins. It started with dark looks on a Monday. A frustrated sideways whipping of the baton to stop us all while he glared at this man followed, and we had to back up a few bars.
The next day rehearsal hadn’t gone more than three minutes before he started in. “You’ve been playing this music for twenty years. Do you think you could make the effort to learn it now?”
Conducting was not something I was prepared to give up. If push came to shove, I would give up the violin bow before I would give up the baton. I typed up my resignation again and this time really sent it to the board president, C. Wanton Balis. As it happened, I forgot to sign it. It was accepted nonetheless.
Ormandy’s feelings were mixed. He had to get this competing conductor out of his orchestra—out of his city! But he wanted the concertmaster. He asked me to stay while he searched for my replacement.
Once during that last year with the Philadelphia Orchestra, we were all standing around at 30th Street Station waiting for a train to Baltimore for a concert. Ormandy motioned me aside.
“Why would you give this up, Anshel? It’s the best job in the world.”
“I have to.”
“Do you want more money? I could get that.”
“Boss, I really want to conduct.”
“You’d be miserable. It’s a headache!”
Boris Sokoloff, the orchestra manager, joined us. “How do you know what orchestra you’ll get?” he asked. “It certainly won’t be on the level of Philadelphia.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Ormandy snapped. “A musician like Anshel will succeed wherever he goes!”
I could hardly give a better example of relating to Ormandy. His head was so full of contradictory opinions that he himself didn’t know which one was coming out of his mouth next.
His brilliant conducting continued to amaze and educate me, even as our relationship became ever more unpredictable. I watched closely how he managed to accompany soloists so that they felt completely comfortable with the orchestra. Of course he knew the solo part as well as the soloist.
Memory has a sovereignty all its own, and mine gives me no access to Ormandy’s farewell, though it was probably kind. I do have a photograph of the final handshake on stage.
What I remember is a conversation I had with him shortly after returning to Philadelphia from the tour.
I wanted to be up front about the new Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia I was putting together. Of course he knew about it, but I went to his office to tell him how auditions were going.
“I’m happy for you. I really do wish you success,” Dr. Jekyll said.
Not smart enough to quit while I was ahead, I said, “But it’s really too bad the Chamber Orchestra couldn’t continue. The players loved it and so did I.”
Mr. Hyde emerged. “You took my best players—musicians I had selected and trained. With one or two lousy rehearsals, you played to large audiences and took all the accolades. I couldn’t let that continue. You promised you wouldn’t conduct. You promised to stay at least ten years. You lied on all counts.”
Some months later, when I was no longer in the Philadelphia Orchestra, my chamber orchestra was doing well. Audiences were large, reviewers raved. Westinghouse wanted a TV special.
In the midst of the excitement, I was also planning our second season. We needed soloists, and Rudolf Firkusny came to mind. A great pianist and a friend of mine, surely he’d want to play with us.
And maybe he would have. I never found out.
Our manager Sam Flor sent a request to Firkusny’s manager at CAMI. No reply. When I prodded Sam to get an answer, he called the CAMI manager again.
“Firkusny’s not available to us,” Sam reported.
“Why not?”
“Because we can’t use any of that manager’s artists.”
This locked out only a dozen or so soloists, but for some reason it made me mad.
When I’m mad I should go stick my head in the sand. Instead, I picked up the phone and called the guy at CAMI. I knew him somewhat and had found him personable.
“Any soloist who performs with your Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia,” he said, “is unlikely to be engaged by Ormandy again.”
After almost seven years, Brusilow left the concertmaster’s chair of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1966, to form the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia. He became conductor of the Dallas Symphony, and later accepted a teaching-performing-conducting post with the University of North Texas in Denton. Anshel Brusilow died in 1998, a few months short of his 90th birthday.
Anshel Brusilow on conducting:
“Conducting is a misunderstood profession: you wave your hands and the orchestra plays. Of course, you can just do that, and most musicians will keep playing. But it is hard on them.
In order to do their job, they need something from you. Your personal interpretation, in fact your personality, needs to come through all your expressions and movements. You have to communicate with them in a hundred ways, not just with your stick.
And then – just as important - you have to get out of the way and let the musicians run. Sound is best when an instrument vibrates maximally, which happens when the musician is relaxed. It doesn’t happen when you terrorize your players. The heavy-handed conductor may get perfection without getting any real music.”
SHOOT THE CONDUCTOR, p.239