No. 1 Rumanian

Those Philharmonic subscribers who considered Guest Conductor Igor Stravinsky too bloodless and ascetic (TIME, Jan. 25) last week found his successor, Georges Enesco, more to their taste. They clapped warmly when the burly, bigheaded Rumanian walked awkwardly onto the stage of Carnegie Hall to lead the Philharmonic for the first time in his life. Stoop-shouldered and serious, Georges Enesco showed in his conducting neither the agility of Barbirolli nor the machine regularity of Stravinsky. But nobody could doubt Enesco's knowledge of the orchestra, his anxious and humble devotion to the scores.

Except for the Gluck overture with which he began, Enesco played music that Manhattan seldom hears. Throughout he had plenty of opportunity to indulge his fondness for big climaxes and shattering brasses. But even these could not keep people from realizing that the Dukas Symphony in C Major was hackneyed and too long. Rumanian Mihail Jora's Marche Juive, played for the first time in the U. S., sounded trifling.

Like Stravinsky, Georges Enesco is better known as a composer. Last week's audience was warmest in praise of his Symphony in E Flat Major, found it packed with' thematic material, glowing with unfamiliar melodies. For those who knew about Enesco's boyhood in the Rumanian countryside, this was not surprising.

Georges Enesco's people were farmers.

He was born in the Moldavian Hills in 1881. He used to listen to the songs of gypsies and repeat them on a crude, three-stringed fiddle. At 7, his father tried to enter him in Vienna Conservatory. Master Hellmesberger squinted over his spectacles, growled that the Conservatory was "not a cradle," took the boy in grudgingly. Four years later young Georges won first prizes in violin and harmony.

Enesco was 12 when he continued his studies in composition and harmony at the Paris Conservatory. He had teachers like Massenet and Faure. At 17 he took a brilliant first prize in violin and began to tour.

Today, Georges Enesco remains a great violinist and a gifted composer. Rumanians consider him their best conductor as well. To him they owe the beginnings of a true Rumanian school in music. For eleven years Enesco was Yehudi Menuhin's violin teacher, and the two broadcast a violin duet together last fortnight in Manhattan. Prodigy Menuhin, now 20, says: "In Enesco I have discovered what I have been searching for all my lifetime."

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