Music: His Honor’s Baton

On a hot morning last week in Manhattan’s Municipal (“poor man’s”) Court, the slight, grey-haired judge listened to many and varied complaints. (Sample: an indignant woman, exhibiting her ill-fitting false teeth, demanded a refund from her dentist.) The day’s weary business done, the judge climbed from the bench and went uptown to his avocation: conducting 100 amateur musicians. Judge Leopold Prince was rehearsing his City Amateur Symphony Orchestra for the season’s first summer concert.

On the Central Park Mall on Saturday night, the 65-year-old magistrate led his orchestra of elevator operators, lawyers and middle-aged housewives in an all-Russian program. Part of the audience sprawled on the grass and enjoyed peanuts and ice cream with the music — but the musicians had more fun than anybody.

Prussian-born Judge Prince has always had friends who couldn’t let music alone either. In 1927 he gathered a few of them together in his Harlem apartment. When the neighbors and Mrs. Prince objected, Judge Prince moved his weekly rehearsals to a public-school building.

The orchestra’s four winter and six summer concerts are free. This open-handed policy, the judge figures, has cost him some $20,000 over the years for scores, supplies, and an occasional pair of pants or a dinner for a broke but promising musician. As he nervously, conscientiously whips his musicians through the hoops, his courtroom manner vanishes : “I raise hell with them … I work myself into a wreck . . . but I keep my dignity.”