ABRAVANEL! By Lowell Durham; University of Utah Press; 216 pages; $25.
A little more than halfway through the above volume it is recalled, via the pages of Time magazine, how before one of their many tours of the Mountain States, Utah Symphony music director Maurice Abravanel received a letter from Dillon, Mont. " `We're just a bunch of cowboys,' he was told. `Play anything you want.' Replied Abravanel, `I think you deserve the best.' Dillon was treated to Beethoven's `Eroica' Symphony.""Our reward for this hard traveling is the reaction of a small-town audience when it hears a symphony orchestra for the first time," the maestro goes on to say. "If I could choose how and where to die, I would like it to happen while conducting my orchestra in a place like Dillon, Mont."
Happily that has not yet occurred; the 86-year-old conductor is still around to enjoy this latest tribute to himself and his most enduring accomplishment, the orchestra he raised to international prominence during his 32 seasons at its helm.
Former Salt Lake Tribune music critic Lowell Durham was on the scene for all of that, as well as the years immediately surrounding. Indeed, as a member of the search committee pressed into service to find a replacement after Abravanel's retirement in 1979, he was in a unique position to observe the aftermath of the maestro's tenure.
But apart from a few insider tips, most of what passes here for critical commentary consists of quotes from other people, mostly out-of-town critics in praise of the orchestra's tours and recordings. Otherwise the maestro himself does most of the talking (as he obviously did to the Time reporters - who else would have known about the letter from Dillon?), largely drawn from lectures and interviews he has given since his retirement.
That is very much in character and, I think, the most enjoyable part of the book. Abravanel's early years, for example, are pretty much recalled through his eyes. And as valuable as other perspectives might have been - on his abbreviated mid-'30s tenure at the Metropolitan Opera, for instance - he is always an engaging commentator, and never more so than when the subject is himself. ("It's like sittin' down with the record book," a disgruntled member of the orchestra once confided to me.)
Still, the behind-the-scenes glimpses are interesting as far as they go. Between the early struggle for survival and the international triumphs, we hear of occasional run-ins with LDS Church officials and even the orchestra's own board members. As Abravanel tells it, no less than LDS President J. Reuben Clark Jr. was instrumental in getting then-Gov. J. Bracken Lee to veto a critical appropriation for the orchestra in 1949. Even the maestro's long-running feud with former Utah Symphony president and Ballet West doyen Glenn Walker Wallace receives a passing mention, as do his not-always-friendly relations with other concert promoters.
But for the most part this is a record of achievement and consolidation. Amply documented are the European-born Abravanel's efforts on behalf of not only the Utah Symphony but Utah composers, in particular Leroy J. Robertson, whose music he championed from his first season in 1947-48 to his last.
We learn how he used his ties with the University of Utah to expand not only his orchestra's season but opera and ballet locally - a legacy that has likewise endured. We see him sidestepping union rules in order to keep his orchestra going during the paycheckless months of 1949 and eventually forging an unprecedented agreement (since undone by subsequent contracts) that allowed the Utah Symphony to make a bigger splash on the international recording scene than many supposedly bigger fish in the pond.
As with most projects of this kind, there are a few omissions. Why, for instance, are we never told the circumstances under which the young Abravanel, newly arrived in Berlin, met composer Kurt Weill, so important to his career not only then but as late as the '30s and '40s? And why is there no mention of the now-annual "Salute to Youth" concerts he was instrumental in founding in his second decade with the Utah Symphony? (The appended discography and list of guest conductors are similarly incomplete.)
Moreover, some of Durham's historical assertions are open to question. "There were no new operas produced in New York in those days," he says of Abravanel's two seasons at the Met (originally he had been contracted for three). But the first of those included not only the American premiere of Hageman's "Caponsacchi," with the composer conducting, but the world premiere of Walter Damrosch's "The Man Without a Country" (revived the following year). And how in the wake of his stage and screen successes (including an Oscar nomination for "Dodsworth" in 1936) can Durham maintain with a straight face that in 1938, at the time of their work together on Weill's "Knickerbocker Holiday," Walter Huston was "then relatively unknown" vis-a-vis co-stars Ray Middleton and Dick Colnear?
What I really miss, though, is any sense of what it was like to watch Abravanel at work, or what Durham perceives as having been the qualities that set his conducting apart. What interpretive gifts did he bring to the podium, for example, apart from what others have said about his Mahler? And how to account for his stick technique, so individual (and some would say hard to follow) that he himself once admitted to me it was why he refused to take conducting students?
But it is a beautifully produced book, with such a generous selection of photographs - some of them quite wonderful - that one can almost reconstruct the maestro's visual impact. That cannot be discounted in a business that places so much emphasis on image. But clearly there was more to Abravanel than that, which is why not only Montanans but Utahns nearly always got his, and Beethoven's, best.