The Rise of "Little Igor"

When the Lamoureux Orchestra of Paris presented the French premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin in 1887, with the memory of the Franco-Prussian War still lingering in the audience's mind, the conductor prudently laid a revolver on his desk before picking up the baton. Since then Lamoureux conductors have needed no firearms, although the orchestra has consistently crusaded for modern music, introduced works of Dukas, Debussy, Ravel, Honneger. Last week the Lamoureux arrived in Manhattan to begin an ambitious U.S. tour (27 cities in 35 days) under the baton of Russian-born Igor Markevitch, one of Europe's most gifted conductors.

For the Love of It. The orchestra's opening concert was as relentlessly French, and often as cloying, as a roomful of Watteau landscapes--Gounod's Symphony No. 2, Messiaen's Hymne, Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe Suite, Berlioz' Symphonic Fantastique. In general, the sound of the orchestra was lighter than U.S. ears are accustomed to (the strings in particular had a papery quality), and some blurred, ragged playing suggested a lack of discipline. One possible reason: the Lamoureux (like Paris' Pasdeloup and Colonne orchestras and the Societe des Concerts) is cooperatively run by the musicians themselves. Concerts are held only on Sundays, and during the week the players hold other jobs--with the Paris Opera Orchestra, the band of the Garde Republicaine, the French National Radio Orchestra. The Lamoureux men play mostly for the love of it: when they divide up profits at year's end, they get barely $100 apiece.

What the concert demonstrated more forcibly than anything else was that the Lamoureux is considerably less talented than its conductor. The reverse, Igor Markevitch believes, is usually the case. There are plenty of fine orchestras, but a woeful lack of first-rate conductors.

Bike for Beethoven? Markevitch himself turned to conducting relatively late. Born 47 years ago in Kiev--in the family chateau, where Michael Glinka, a distant relative, wrote A Life for the Czar--Markevitch grew up in Switzerland, early started playing four-hand duets with his pianist father. He soon gave evidence of a highly sensitive ear, once astounded a friend by blindfolding himself and counting, correctly, three bees clustered on an apple in a nearby tree. "I 'see' with my ear," Markevitch says now. "In hotels I 'see' the private lives of my neighbors, which is not always pleasant." The infant prodigy was carefully nurtured; when a kindly aunt offered him a bicycle, his mother refused it, exclaiming indignantly: "Did Beethoven have a bicycle?" He studied composition with famed Nadia Boulanger, the musical nanny of a generation of modern composers.

By the time he was 16, Markevitch had written a piano concerto and at the elegant Paris premiere, Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson noted waspishly, the audience half expected to "be given boxes of dragees to take home with the name of Little Igor painted on them in blue."

But Little Igor was not all candy. Some called him "the young Rimbaud," and he was taken up by all the "in" people. He married Nijinsky's daughter Kira (they were divorced during the war, and he is now married to an Italian princess). He wrote a cantata on a poem by Jean Cocteau, Hymnes, for orchestra, and a host of other breathlessly energetic works.

The Radio Tap. When he was not yet 20, Markevitch studied conducting for several months with Scherchen ("Sometimes he would wake me up at two in the morning to say he felt in the mood to give me a lesson"). World War II helped nudge him into a fulltime conducting career.

Trapped in Italy, he worked for the Resistance, once helped blow up a train. At war's end he reorganized the orchestras at Florence's famed Maggio Musicale with such success that he soon became one of the busiest conductors in Europe.

Markevitch now juggles two orchestras, the Lamoureux and the Montreal Symphony, spends the rest of his time guest conducting about the world and teaching. His special interest is working out a more exact conducting vocabulary; strictly defined movements by the conductor, he feels, ought to evoke a strictly standardized response from the orchestra. But he is also concerned about the response of his music-glutted audiences. "To have Beethoven coming out of the radio tap from morning to night," says Markevitch, "is worse than not knowing Beethoven at all."

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