When something goes wrong with rehearsals of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Conductor Antal Dorati doesn't take it out on the musicians. Instead, he is apt to tell them: "We'll take a five-minute break while I go give myself hell." He goes into his dressing room, kicks things around for a while, then comes back glowing. The treatment seems to be as efficacious for his musicians as it is for him.
Last week, Conductor Dorati had more cause than usual to kick the furniture. He had been brought to Manhattan to be music director of a new "World's Fair of Music." A 70-piece orchestra, plus such big name help as Benny Goodman and Ella Fitzgerald, Ballet Dancers Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, had been signed up to lure lookers and listeners into Grand Central Palace.
All went well the first two days; then Manhattan had a hot spell and practically nobody came. The union got nervous about its musicians' pay, and on the fourth day, just as Benny Goodman was going on to tootle a clarinet version of Debussy's Rhapsody for Saxophone and Orchestra, the union called its men off the job. Dorati, who had sat up half the night studying Debussy's score on a plane from Chicago (he had flown out the night before to conduct in Chicago's Grant Park), took the bad news with a good nature rare among conductors in crises.
Boy at the Door. In his 42 years, Antal Dorati has faced many a crisis and weathered them all. After he graduated from the Budapest Conservatory, where he worked under both Bartók and Kodály (TIME, July 19), he began to conduct in provincial German towns in his early 20s. Once, when he assured the doorman at Miinster's opera house that he was its new director, the doorman laughed in the boy's face, refused to let him in until a city official arrived to identify him. His next big job—and the one that eventually brought him to Dallas—was conducting for Colonel DeBasil's helter-skelter ballet company, which, says Dorati, "became so unoriginal they had to call themselves the Original Ballet Russe,"
In his three years in Dallas, Dorati has become a kind of Hungarian Texan (and a U.S. citizen) who knows how to get along with Dallas businessmen. He is also a fine musician who has helped carry many a Texan the long distance from San Antonio Rose to Bartók "without going out of my way to annoy them." Dorati has given Dallas world premieres of works by Paul Hindemith, Walter Piston and George Antheil. Some Texans now brag almost as much about their symphony orchestras as about the size of their state.
Children on Stage. One way Dorati won Dallas over was to get his supporters young. He gives ten children's concerts a year, and lets talented kids sit in with the orchestra once a year. The first year, only four little fiddlers (one of whom made a puddle on the stage) could make the grade. Last year he had a stage full: 30 violinists, 17 cellists and one violist. He also trained a schoolkids' chorus to sing Kodaly's Psalmus Hungarians—in Hungarian.
Dorati is as proud of Dallas ("a conductor's paradise") as the city is of him. Says he: "By now, I cannot cheat them musically even if I wanted to."