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Mahler program one night and a Gershwin concert shortly afterand thecritics like them both.

“I used toseem to oscillate among diflferent things. I worked with Boulezat theOjai Festival and in 1966 I followed him to Bayreuth, where I had the chancc to help him rehearse Parsifal. That s when I was eon verted to Wagner. In California I played piano accompaniments for the Piatigorsky master classes and I rehearsed the orchestra for the famous Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts. Piatigorsky used to say: ‘People will always think the last thing you did is what you do.' Whereas it isjust that I am wholly at one with whatever I do musically. People would say: ‘What’s he doing that for? He’s a conductorof modem musie. What’s he doing with German romantic musie?’ But now that they know morę of me they accept me and thescope of what I do.’’ He mused. “Do you know it took me almost twenty-eight years to become reeonciled to theC major scalę and to accept the fact that diatonic musie was not a trap to make me think that everything will turn out fine in the end?”

He talksobsessively. He reads the same way—everything: Grove’s, the dictionary, cook books. But basically he reads nonfiction and poetry. “Crane, Whitman, Eliot, Cummings, Quasimodo. A few years ago I read all of Keatsand Michelangelo.” He is interested in art, especially aboriginal and American Indian and theconstructivist movement. And in the theater— natural, with his background —he is absorbed in “related-arts movements.” He feels two world wars“disrupted the continuity of musie” and that “a sophistication ofchoice-making” was lost. In recent years “a great deal of quote experimental musie unquote is being performed, a lot of it extremely dissonant. Now weare seeinga new tonal movement and all kindsof composers are jumping on the bandwagon and a number of critics are supporting this musie for their own reasons. Both developments reflect the fact that contact with the mainstream of musie is lost. It was dilferent with a composerat the timeof Schoenberg. He had an understandingofwhat musie had been and could use it.”

He talked of Ivcsand Ruggles, Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman. “They were American romantics. They believed: ‘Think it right.

Do it right. Live it right.’ ” He had been faseinated by Ruggles sińce he first heard Men and Mounlams when he was thirteen. “His musie is entirely about his deeply felt feelings.” One of his great experiences was when he visited Ruggles not long before he died at ninety-five. The trip seemed a natural prelude to his New England meeting with the great old man. It wasearly June, lilac-time.

He said to his drivcr, a Connecticut Yankee: “The lilacs are so fragrant, so beautiful now.” The drivcr’s response: “You find them in old fields near broken-down stone walls where there were onee houses, years ago. Lilacsonly make me think of the boys who went to theCivil War and nevercame home.”

Weasked his plans. There was the Los Angeles Philharmonie, of which he is now principal guest conductor along with Simon Rattle [see page 4|, and other engagements here: Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Dallas. Then there are theorchestrasabroad to which he returns regularly: the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, London Philharmonia, Yienna Symphony. There is also opera. It started with the American premiere of the complete Lulu for the Santa Fe Opera, went on to The Flying Dnlchman at t he Orange Festival. I.ast spring he madę his New York City Opera defcut with Janacek's Cunnmg Lillle Vixen, which he repcatcd this autumn. Soon he will be doing his first Bohemę—the vcry first opera heever heard—with the Welsh National Opera. And then there are those recordings.

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