Goodbye to Pittsburgh

No matter how good the music was, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's trustees weren't willing to go deep into debt to pay for it. To get back in the black, they chopped three weeks off the coming season--even though the season was already barely long enough to keep many of the players going. Said Conductor Fritz Reiner, "I am willing to have my salary cut. I am not willing to have the orchestra cut." So last week he quit.

In his ten years in Pittsburgh, Hungarian-born Fritz Reiner's sharp tongue and stern baton won him more admirers than friends. But he gave Pittsburgh an orchestra to be proud of. Three years ago, when the trustees let him build it up to 90 men and lengthen the season, the Pittsburgh Symphony became one of the ten best in the U.S.

Conductor Reiner, 59, a grown-up wonder boy who conducted his first orchestra at twelve, would have little trouble finding some other podium to wave from. He is a first-rate conductor of Mozart and Strauss operas--and the Metropolitan Opera badly needs additional conductors (one recently died, two others have been ill on & off). Besides, there is the increasingly attractive guest conductors' circuit, with few of the cares and all the pleasures of a regular berth. At week's end, the Minneapolis Symphony snapped him up for eight concerts in October. The only real loser was Pittsburgh.

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