Two-man Orchestra

Some U. S. symphony orchestras change conductors almost as rapidly as women change hat styles. Not so the 48-year-old Chicago Symphony. Its first conductor, the late Theodore Thomas, lasted 14 years. When he died in 1905, Chicagoans got a new one, a droop-mustached German named Frederick Stock. Him they have kept ever since.

Chicago music-lovers, remarkably constant in their devotion to Conductor Stock, are also remarkably devoted to the memory of Conductor Thomas. Every year since Conductor Thomas' death, a memorial concert has been held in his honor. Last week dignified 66-year-old Stock ambled to his place on the stage of Chicago's long-used Orchestra Hall to commemorate for the 34th time the death of his predecessor. Behind him sat 2,500 rapt Chicagoans, many of them oldsters who had heard their first overture played under Thomas' energetic baton. Solemnly they listened while white-haired Stock conducted Debussy's Berceuse heroique, Richard Strauss's A Hero's Life, Beethoven's heroic Fifth Symphony.

Thirty-four years ago, when Conductor Stock left his place among the orchestra's viola players to succeed Thomas as the Chicago Symphony's head man, Chicago concertgoers were skeptical. During his first year Chicago newspapers printed scathing articles about the need for a more eminent conductor. But patient, plodding Stock stuck to his guns. In the many seasons since then he has made himself a reputation as one of the topflight U. S. conductors. Genial Frederick Stock prefers, and conducts best, the works of the German romantics, but he gives his audience a more varied and balanced musical diet than any other U. S. conductor except, perhaps, Boston's Sergei Koussevitzky.

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