The Perfect Doctor

"San Francisco is a great and beautiful city," said Conductor Josef Krips. "Why should it not have a great and beautiful orchestra?" With that, Krips set confidently to work in his new post as musical director of the San Fran cisco Symphony Orchestra. Last week he opened the regular season with an all-Beethoven program, and the new era of music that San Francisco had promised itself when he was hired seemed suddenly to have arrived.

San Francisco's troubled musical past had always baffled its narcissistic resi dents. The symphony attracted excel lent musicians, if only for the sake of its pleasant location, but it traditionally suffered conductor trouble. Under its last conductor, Enrique Jorda, it had woeful bad luck playing the very center of the classic repertoire, and Jorda's faltering hand stirred a cauldron of bickers and feuds that hurt the or chestra further.

For such ailments, Krips is the perfect doctor. He is a master of cajolery and charm, and a bulging pocket of ambition. He descends from a long line of Viennese-school conductors (Gustav Mahler, Felix Weingartner and Bruno Wal ter), and in his singing, legato style, he is one of the world's most admired conductors. His ar rival in San Francisco brought the city to a pitch of enthusiasm it had not felt for years.

During his nine years as leader of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Krips won a wide reputation as an espe cially authoritative spokesman for Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms, but he is more concerned with his approach to the whole repertoire than with mastering any special part of it. "We must apply the technique of the singer to the instruments," he says. "A musi cian has to feel that he is sing ing, supporting the music by the breath. The breath is your soul. The breath is your life--the only divine part of you."

Such talk rings nicely in the musicians' ears ("We like to come to work now," says a flautist), but even with all the enthusiasm Krips has generated in San Francisco, he is making a late start at building a minor orchestra into a major one; at 61, he already has 42 years on the podium behind him. But in this, as in all matters, Krips is a mountain of good-humored assurance. "I am," he says fondly, "a builder."

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