Gifted Greek

Last week the sedate lights of Manhattan's Carnegie Hall shone on a well-polished bald head, which bobbed and weaved over the assorted pates of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra. Now & then the glabrous dome would shake like a furiously boiling egg, starting a corporeal tremolo through the whole lean, ascetic body. Long arms and clenched fists flailed high & low. It was a sight to see. And from the Philharmonic this flailing and shaking drew the most satisfactory and exciting sounds since the days of Arturo Toscanini.

Dimitri Mitropoulos thus went through the second week of a month's spell as guest conductor of the Philharmonic. This 44-year-old Greek had been summoned from Minneapolis, whose symphony he has conducted for three years, while the Philharmonic's floppy-haired John Barbirolli--a British subject of Italian-French parentage--went westward, guest-conducting on his own. After recent critical blasts at Barbirolli's spiritless stick-waving (TIME, Dec. 9), veiled comparisons and references to Greek v. Italian were inevitable. Almost unanimously the critics handed Conductor Mitropoulos the decision. Thanks to him, the Philharmonic was itself again, one of the world's great orchestras -- if only for a month.

Conductor Mitropoulos is a pious Orthodox Catholic who always wears a crucifix and a medal of the Virgin, almost followed his family's bent toward the monastery. Composer and pianist, he was trained in Greece and Germany, built the orchestra of the Athens Conservatory, made his first U. S. splash in Boston. He looks somewhat like a figure from a can vas by another great Greek, Domenico Theotocopuli (called El Greco in Spain, where he lived). The Mitropoulitan way of playing music is a bit El Grecoesque: lean, angular, edgy, sometimes distorted.

Mitropoulos wowed his first Manhattan audience by performing, from memory and without baton, a tough and little-played work, Richard Strauss's Sinfonia Domestica -- 45 minutes of sound representing a particularly lurid day in the Strauss family. Mitropoulos wowed his orchestra too, although some of them resented having to work hard for a change.

Not only did he dispense with the score on the platform: at rehearsals he could refer his men to a numbered section of the score, sight unseen. Says he, simply: "I learn the music." Last week rumors flew that the Phil harmonic might offer Conductor Mitro poulos a permanent job. To get him, the orchestra management would have to buy off Barbirolli, whose contract at a comparatively modest salary has two years to run. Minneapolis, which turns out the biggest weekly symphonic audience in the U. S. -- as many as 5,000 people in enormous Northrop Auditorium -- pays Mitro poulos a big salary as such things go: $25,000 a year. His present contract ex pires at the end of this season. Dimitri Mitropoulos lives simply, avoids parties, prefers the movies or the company of orchestramen. Twice last week he tele phoned Minneapolis, said he missed the boys and disliked Manhattan's whirl.

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