Monday, May. 13, 1940
Last of the Wallensteins
Proud of its Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, its NBC Symphony under $4,000-a-shot Arturo Toscanini, is National Broadcasting Co. Proud of smaller but nevertheless comparable achievements in good music is Newark, N. J.'s Station WOR which, operating on a single station's budget, feeds its programs to the Mutual network. Music director of WOR for five years has been smart, dapper, businesslike Alfred ("Wally") Wallenstein, onetime concert and orchestra cellist. One of the best of native U. S. conductors, Wallenstein leads a WOR Sinfonietta and a group called Symphonic Strings. This spring for the 300th time he gave a work--it was Honegger's Harvest suite--its first playing. He completed a two-year cycle, with chorus and soloists, of 103 Bach cantatas, wound up a series of all of Mozart's 26 piano concertos (with Pianist Nadia Reisenberg). Last week Director Wallenstein was at work on his toughest project to date: a cycle of most of Mozart's 21 operas, to run for 13 weeks or more, possibly with a break during the summer.
Mozart needs singers capable of shaping a long melodic line, of pulling their weight in ensembles. For the first act of The Magic Flute this week (Saturday, 9:30 to 10:30 p.m. E. D. S. T.), Director Wallenstein signed up such able radio performers as Sopranos Vivian della Chiesa and Genevieve Rowe, Metropolitan Tenor George Rasely. Wallenstein, as useful dickering for WOR as he is stick-waving, has other Metropolitan names in mind for later performances. After the second half of The Magic Flute, two rarely performed Mozart one-acters will have their U. S. radio debuts: Bastien and Bastienne and The Impresario. U. S. Mozartians, whose letters lead Mr. Wallenstein to believe that their tribe is increasing, will hear not only the familiar Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni but such curiosities as The Escape from the Seraglio, The Clemency of Titus.
Three hundred years ago Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein was a German general in the Thirty Years' War, during which a third of the population of Germany was wiped out. He was later immortalized in a trilogy of plays by Schiller. Conductor Alfred Franz Wallenstein is the hero's umpteenth-grandnephew, last of the Wallenstein male line. He was born in Chicago, at eight was given a cello instead of a bicycle, reluctantly turned out to be a prodigy. He played in knee pants in movie orchestras, joined the San Francisco Symphony, toured South America performing the famed, sweet cello accompaniment for Anna Pavlova's Dying Swan.
In 1922 Alfred Wallenstein landed in the Chicago Symphony, whose Conductor Frederick Stock spoke up for him when, in 1929, the first cello desk of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony fell vacant. For Maestro Toscanini, himself a onetime cellist and then the Philharmonic conductor, Wallenstein soon became teacher's pet. He was made a member of the Philharmonic board of directors, received the highest salary in the orchestra--perhaps $750 a week. Gossips told (as Oscar Levant does in A Smattering of Ignorance) how Wallenstein, playing under Guest Conductor Bruno Walter, airily gazed everywhere but at the man with the baton. Walter took Wallenstein aside, asked what his ambition was. To be a conductor, replied the cellist. "I hope," said Walter gently, "that you have no Wallensteins playing under you."
Although Wally Wallenstein shows the influence of Toscanini's hard-driving leadership, he gets along well with his WOR men, has made them a thoroughly capable house orchestra. Boyish-looking at 41. Wallenstein has given up cello recitals, which are not very rewarding to audiences, less so to performers. Besides shaping WOR's musical policies, he conducts schmalz and semi-classical music for NBC's Voice of Firestone program. The two jobs pay him about $30,000 a year. Among U. S. musicians, Conductor Wallenstein is rated by many an expert with such up-&-comers as Chicago's Izler Solomon, Colorado's Edwin McArthur. His big chance to prove himself will come next winter, when he takes over Toscanini's NBC Symphony for a spell.
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