U. S. Maestro

Conductors who can rouse both their musicians and their audiences to frenzied enthusiasm are born, not made. Few seem to be born in the U.S.* But last week in Manhattan's Town Hall one budding U.S.-born conductor had Manhattan's surliest critics holding their breaths with excitement. He was an earnest-looking, square-faced, 26-year-old Californian, Robert Shaw, and he was conducting a hastily trained chorus of 170-odd singers in a program of modern music by Manhattan's William Schuman.

The critics were excited not so much by Conductor Shaw's musicianship as by the way he held the minutest control over his singers. Gesticulating with feverish intensity, Conductor Shaw suggested a cross between Arturo Toscanini and an overwrought college cheerleader. By the time he had finished, a hand-picked audience agreed that his Collegiate Chorale was one of the finest in the U.S.

One reason Robert Shaw's conducting abilities came as a surprise to high-brow critics is that he grew up on the popular side of the musical tracks. Five years ago he was studying for the ministry at Pomona College, Calif. His father is the Rev. Shirley R. Shaw of the University Christian Church in San Diego. But there was also music in the Shaw family. Robert's mother, Nell Lawson Shaw, was a well-known West Coast church singer. His older sister, Hollace, made a soprano name for herself on the General Electric Hour of Charm radio program. Robert (who was working his way through Pomona by wrapping loaves of bread in a local bakery) became leader of the Pomona College Glee Club.

In 1938 Bandleader Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians visited Pomona to make a movie on the campus, heard Shaw conduct, offered him a job in Manhattan. Shaw accepted, took over the conductorship of Waring's chorus. On the side he organized three 24-voice glee clubs for Broadway's Billy Rose, helped train the World's Fair Aquacade swimmers to swim in time to music.

A year ago Shaw got his first chance in high-brow music when Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Church invited him to conduct its choir on the side. So far, husky, blue-eyed Robert Shaw has stuck to choruses, never attempted to conduct a symphony orchestra. But symphonic bigwigs from Leopold Stokowski to Sergei Koussevitzky have offered to teach him how. Self-consciously modest, yet with a touch of the fire-&-brimstone revivalist, he refuses to be rushed. Says he: "Up until the past year I felt more like a cheerleader than a choral director. Dawgonnit! I don't feel I have any manifest destiny."

*Of the men who conduct the 17 big U.S. symphony orchestras, only one (the Kansas City Philharmonic's Karl Krueger) is U.S.-born. More native talent undoubtedly exists but is not used.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.