The walls of Milan's famed old La Scala opera house almost visibly quivered. Fifteen jazz musicians, sporting candy-striped shirts and elastic armbands, took the stage and let loose with a blistering Strike Up the Band while a covey of chubby little ballerinas in split-to-the-hip satin skirts twitched their pelvises and tried their best to look naughty. Enter a Mississippi riverboat gaily puffing smoke. Switch to an 80-ft.-high wooden Eiffel Tower. Then, rising from beneath the stage on elevator platforms like hosts of angels, the 100-piece orchestra, jazz band, singers and dancers unite for one big, rousing finale.
The occasion was the world premiere last week of Gershwiniana, a $100,000 "ballet-cantata" based on George Gershwin's music and billed as "a great moment in Italo-American collaboration." After opening night, the bemused Milanese had another name for it: "La Scala Follies." The critics had some complaints, some major (Director Maner Lualdi's failure to stitch the kaleidoscopic scenes into a visual and dramatic whole), and some minor ("How can one stage a 1910 New Orleans dance palace without calling in a single colored face?").
Secret Lessons. But one colored face was called in. It belonged to Conductor Henry Lewis, and for him the critics had nothing but praise. Lean and rangy as a cowpuncher, he had the orchestra playing in the best big-band tradition of the 1940s for lighter numbers, deftly shaped a generous symphonic sound for Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue with grand, sweeping gestures. Says Lewis: "It's harder getting a symphony to swing than getting a jazz ensemble to play Bach." At performance's end, the audience cried "Grazie, maestro!" and the string players tapped their bows on their instruments, a high compliment that the tradition-minded orchestra has paid to only two other conductors (Herbert von Karajan and Victor de Sabata) in the past 20 years.
Though Negroes have long had total acceptance in the operatic world as singers (after all, a voice is a voice), they have had slower going in the orchestra pit. Lewis' only notable predecessor as a Negro conductor was Dean Dixon, now 50, who became the first Negro ever to lead a major U.S. orchestra when he guest-conducted the New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony in the early 1940s. But discouraged by his chances of landing a permanent job in the U.S., he moved to Europe in 1949, then to Australia, where he is currently conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. "One of the most important things I can do now," says Lewis, "is to give to other Negroes the incentive to try to win positions with symphonic organizations."