Sunday Maestro

Sunday Maestro

One Sunday afternoon six years ago a pale young conductor stood in a Manhattan radio station, baton tensely raised, waiting for the hands of the clock to reach the dot of three. Columbia Broadcasting System was sending its first program over the air. Pale young Howard Barlow had been chosen to christen the newborn network which was so soon to become the potent rival of wealthy National Broadcasting Co. Musically as well as sentimentally the 3 p. m. hour on Sunday has come to mean much to C. B. S. New York Philharmonic concerts have been broadcast then ever since Columbia's President William S. Paley decided that radio listeners should be given regularly the best of symphonic music, that Columbia would pay for it if commercial sponsors would not. Fortnight ago Conductor Arturo Toscanini ended the Philharmonic season with a memorable Beethoven cycle. Determined to preserve its Sunday afternoon standard. Columbia announced that symphonic music would be continued throughout the summer, that young Howard Barlow would conduct until the Philharmonic returns in the autumn. Last Sunday Conductor Barlow began his season as summer maestro by expertly conducting an all-Brahms program in honor of the late great German composer's 100th birthday (see above).

When people in Plain City, Ohio, tuned in this week on Howard Barlow's first Sunday afternoon concert, a few were less impressed by the music than by the fact that Howard Barlow was born in Plain City, where he used his father's derby for a drum and scribbled musical notes all over the wallpaper. In Mount Carmel, Ill., some remember when he found an old cello, had it fixed up in his lather's lumberyard, rigged it with a set of Sears, Roebuck strings and played it three weeks later in church, wearing knee pads so that the resin on the bow would not spoil his knickerbockers. Denverites recall the days when he sang in the high school glee club conducted by Paul Whiteman's father. At the University of Colorado he led both the glee club and orchestra, would have gone in seriously for music then & there if Father Barlow had not whisked him out of school, determined that no son of his should wear Windsor ties and his hair long. Around Manhattan where Howard Barlow had his first odd jobs conducting, he appeared exactly as his father had prayed that he would not. But musicians and radio experts who last week roundly approved the plume that Columbia had bestowed on its able staff conductor, see him differently now. He is a quiet, businesslike musician with a vast repertoire at his command and a deft way of getting instantaneous results from his musicians. When Conductor Bruno Walter visited the Columbia studios last winter he was astonished to find that in a year Howard Barlow had presented 236 symphonic works. Many of the scores he had mastered riding back & forth on the train to his country place in Poundridge, N. Y., where he fishes and exercises his none-too-sturdy muscles chopping wood. "The March of Time" well illustrate? the sense of timing without which Howard Barlow could not have become a top-notch radio conductor. To provide the musical setting for a half-hour program he often plays snatches from 25 or 30 different compositions. The angry theme from Kempcnski's Fury of the Storm suited the Los Angeles earthquake. Five bars from Franck's D Minor Symphony ended the sentence of Assassin Joseph Zangara. A bit from Baron's Chinese Tragedy set the scene for a battle in the Orient.

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