Music: WPA Maestro

• Share

WPA symphony orchestras employ unemployed musicians. But they seldom draw crowds or move their listeners to rafter-raising applause. An exception to this rule is Chicago's WPA orchestra, the Illinois Symphony. When it was first organized in 1935 the Illinois Symphony was one of the Federal Music Project's ugly ducklings. For a year it bettelhtooped almost unnoticed. In the summer of 1936, the Music Project's pompous national director, Nikolai Sokoloff, went to Chicago to rehearse it for a concert under his own baton. When he heard it play he was afraid to be seen in public with it. Hastily recommending a new conductor and a shakeup in personnel, Director Sokoloff left town.

Then things began to happen. Word soon spread around that the show at the Great Northern Theatre was worth the price of admission (55¢ top). Chicago's best critics ventured inside, came out beaming. Music lovers began to go, found that Chicago's most energetic baton-waving and most stimulating symphonic programs were being dished out by, its WPAsters.

While the WPAsters still worked on at their regular $94-a-month salary, the Illinois Symphony actually began to pile up a profit at the box office. The size of this profit put it in a different class from most other WPA orchestras, enabled it to pay the high performance royalties asked by such ace contemporary composers as Dmitri Shostakovich, Serge Prokofieff, Paul Hindemith, Jean Sibelius.

When great Finnish Composer Sibelius' Fifth and Sixth Symphonies got their first Chicago hearings, it was not the venerable Chicago Symphony but the sprouting Illinois Symphony that played them. The Illini played few symphonic chestnuts, never repeated a composition. By the end of last season they were giving even more "first performances" than Serge Kousse-vitzky's pioneering Boston Symphony. Some of their firsts were imported, some domestic. Last week they played their hundredth composition by a U. S. composer.

The man behind the Illinois Symphony's sudden artistic and box-office success is no imported, caviar-fed maestro, but a pint-sized, 29-year-old Midwestern musician named Izler Solomon. When National Director Sokoloff left town in disgust three years ago, he left the job of reorganizing the orchestra in Solomon's hands. A shrewd young man, as well as a talented maestro, Conductor Solomon saw at a glance that his WPA outfit could never compete on the same grounds with the seasoned, long-established Chicago Symphony. So he and State Project Director Albert Goldberg planned something different. Leaving the classics to white-mustached Frederick Stock, they concentrated on the moderns that Stock was too busy to play. Some of them were not worth playing. But all of them were news. Soon the Illinois Symphony was rated as Chicago's spiciest highbrow musical institution, and Chicago's wide-awake concertgoers were afraid to stay away for fear of missing something good.