Nobody really sees him. Nobody really hears him. He is the fellow in the frayed white tie and tails, the one buried seven rows back peering sourly through a cluster of elbows. He is the symphony musician — bored, frustrated and anonymous. So he didn't become the second Heifetz as everybody back in Glen Falls said he would. There was nothing else to do but join a big-city symphony, file lock-step onto the stage — no talking, please — and, at the nod of the imperious maestro, saw away mechanically at the Brahms First for the 101st time.
Now, however, there is a happy alternative. Like songbirds discovering a hole in the cage, musicians are flying the cooped-up confines of the symphony and roosting in the refuge of the university.
Among the hardest-hit symphonies is the Philadelphia Orchestra, which recently filed suit to prevent three of its best string players — Cellist Charles Brennand, Violinists Veda Reynolds and Irwin Eisenberg — from joining the faculty of the University of Washing ton. The orchestra contends that the musicians handed in their resignations four months shy of the year's notice that their contracts call for. The three, plus Violist Alan Iglitzin, who was released from the orchestra four months ago, are scheduled to perform their first concert next week as the university's new resident string quartet. Meanwhile, the orchestra is wrestling with even bigger problems: at week's end, the 105 Philadelphia musicians were locked in a bitter strike over salaries, forcing the cancellation of the first six concerts of their season.
Artistic Identity. The troubles in Philadelphia are symptomatic of the unrest felt everywhere in the nation's leading orchestras. Two years ago, when the Philadelphia forbade its players to moonlight with any group larger than a sextet, Concertmaster Anshel Brusi-low angrily resigned, took one of the orchestra's musicians with him, and formed the 35-member Chamber Sym phony of Philadelphia.
Essentially, as Boston Symphony Conductor Erich Leinsdorf points out, the problem "is a loss of identity." Because they can offer an opportunity for more individual expression, he says, "the universities are our biggest competition."
To compensate, the progressive Bos ton management founded the Boston Symphony Chamber Players last year (TIME, March 18), encourages all of its players to take on as many solo engagements as they feel they can possibly handle. Says Leinsdorf: "This is very important for the morale of the players who want to keep, and have every right to keep, their artis tic identity."
After all, no string player invests roughly 20 years and $25,000 for training to sit in the hundred-headed obscurity of a symphony orchestra. In his heart, if not in the ear of his audience, he is a full-fledged virtuoso who, says Los Angeles Symphony Conductor Zubin Mehta, "joins a symphony only as a last resort, and then is frustrated." On the campus, however, he can assume the stature of a soloist, play largely what he wants (musicians' tastes rarely agree with those of a symphony audience) the way he wants to (instead of having interpretations dictated by a conductor).