Upsetting the Equilibrium

Jacques Monod is a young (29) French conductor who believes that U.S. musical society is awash in stagnation, apathy and confusion. He sees major orchestras playing programs they could have played (and sometimes did) a century before, their musicians bored and cynical, their conductors hamstrung by bosses who are afraid to venture new things and new directions. As a result. Monod complains, contemporary music is almost a secret, played by enthusiasts for themselves, and in programs selected by squabbling committees who try to satisfy factions rather than present balanced music. Lots of people in the music world have complained about this situation, but Monod has done something about it.

Last week, after six years of studying, playing and conducting in the U.S., he staged the second of a series called "Camera Concerts." one of the biggest and best programs of contemporary orchestral music Manhattan has ever heard.

Refreshed, Puzzled. The concert's four works, written in strange and sometimes perplexing styles, might have left the crowd of 675 stupefied, but instead, left it refreshed. The most ear-cracking work. Webern's scintillant, fractured Variations for Orchestra, was so full of bewitching sonorities that listeners were just becoming adjusted to it when it ended. A nice antidote to this was Copland's durable old (1925) jazzy Music for the Theater. After the intermission. Hungarian Soprano Magda Laszlo. in her U.S. debut, sang solos in Dallapiccola's song trilogy, An Mathilde; its rich-hued. profoundly melancholy finale had to be repeated after a storm of applause. And Schoenberg's freewheeling arrangement of a Handel concerto grosso, Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (featuring the Juilliard Quartet), was just puzzling enough to make a satisfying finale.

Conductor Monod achieved his successful musical evening by a combination of stubborn determination and truculence.

First he spent two solid months burrowing through the brain-creasing mysteries of some of the most complex music ever written, finally organized the program to his satisfaction. Then he spent five hours a day for a week whipping, coaxing and teasing 56 musicians into condition to play it. The result should establish Monod as a conductor of stature.

Worse in Paris. Jacques Monod is a conductor almost against his will. Born near Paris, he was propelled to the piano by his pianist mother; he gave his first concert at nine, and he has hated the piano ever since ("I don't even own one now"). Monod is a dour man. impatient with what he calls "musical politics." and with the mechanics of earning a living. His one steady job, at $150 a month, is as organist in a Roman Catholic church. But if the musical situation is bad in New York, Monod thinks it is even worse back home in Paris. And he also has found, not without benefit to his cause, that it is possible to "sell anything to Americans"; so he has remained here and. over six years, has "sold" some piano and song recitals on his own, mostly at colleges and universities.

The chance to run the Camera Concerts was Monod's big break. The name of the backer is one of the best-kept musical secrets in New York. "We don't want the pressures that have ruined other musical organizations in this city," Monod explains. Monod alone has authority--and the responsibility--for his programs. "I want," he says, "to break up the routine repertory, to upset the equilibrium in concert making. Not just to play premieres, but to play things like an unpublished early work of Ravel, and Beethoven's choral Op. 136 (written in 1814) that nobody ever hears. Schoenberg's last choral work has not been performed in New York, and neither has Sessions' Violin Concerto. It's a scandale."

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