Dayton Daily News from Dayton, Ohio • 104

The Lively Arts with Betty Dietz Kiebs CSO audiences face director's challenge Ill P'X 'if Michael Gielen conducts Cincinnati Symphony, concertos, some vocal music, and the four orchestral suites during the next few seasons. We think that baroque music is not only for specialists. Schumann's less well-known symphonic works and his late vocal music deserve attention. Bruckner is known only like one sees an iceberg." Gielen talked eagerly, as well, of playing more Mahler. Like Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and even Shostakovich, he belongs to the basic repertoire, the conductor said.

In any case, Gielen hopes the audience will come with "open hearts." He said he's willing to meet the public and discuss the music. Some of his European audiences participated in such discussions, but "the average age of the audience was very high. They rebelled against what they thought was programs that were too didactic. They thought I was trying to teach them something artistic," he said wryly. BUT THERE always are "options and decisions" for the conductor, any conductor, he said.

"Compare Furtwangler and Toscaninl their Beethoven. They seem to be two different pieces to anybody with the sensibility to hear." Gielen sat back and sighed. "If anything, I wanted to show them how important it Is not the indifference to what you play in which order to give a sense of direction in programming." For now, though, Gielen said with a laugh, "I will have to be careful not to be too didactic. I must avoid the boomerang, to feel out the audience." He also faces the job of convincing the orchestra even though the man on the podium is the man in charge. Questions of tempo in a work as familiar as the "Eroica" came up.

That's why Gielen said he spent a whole rehearsal on two movements of a "very well known piece. The fact is that I respect his (Beethoven's) metronome. It's so widely different from what any orchestra plays normally, it upsets the bow," he said tactfully. AS FOR THE European style of seating, which unsettled some of the players, Gielen explained: "I think that in classical music up to Mahler, this game of question and answer between the two violin sections is much clearer that way. On the left are the high and the low notes, on the right the inner parts of the string quartet.

And my seating with the clarinets to the right is very good for clarity." Michael Gielen, who heads the Frankfurt Opera and maintains a busy conducting schedule in London as well, admitted he's rarely if ever "not Involved with music." At the end of a season, when he's very tired, Gielen and his wife go to thejr vacation place In Austria. "I do nothing for two days, and then I get restless and start to do something for music." He says he walks, rows and reads "always." He was completing a book on psychoanalysis, and he had just discovered Moby Dick. "It's marvelous, full of unspected relationships, many layers of meanings." TO A QUESTION about why he hadn't followed his famous father into the theater, Gielen smiled. "But I am in the theater in the opera house. But I became a musician instead." A concert-goer when possible, Gielen also keeps up a fast friendship of many years standing with the musicians of the LaSalle Quartet The Cincinnati-based quartet makes several trips to Europe each year for concert tours.

"We have more than an interest In Schoenberg but also a different approach to Beethoven which comes from the Schoenberg school," Gielen said. Gielen will be followed to the CSO podium by a number of prominent guest conductors. Then, in January, Kazimierz Kord will return to Music Hall. Music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, he was named principal guest conductor of the CSO. Gielen, whose guest concerts followed Kord's last November, revealed a keen wit at the close of one interview.

Of himself and Kord, he said, "The two matadors." Betty Dietz Krebs is arts editor of The Dayton Dally News. There may not be as many Michael Gielen thumb prints on this year's Cincinnati Symphony programs as the audience can expect three years hence. On the other hand, the CSO's new music director, who will be conducting his first performances in his official capacity Friday and Saturday, feels the first three will be a signal, "a signal of how I want to compose programs to ask the audience to collaborate, the German conductor said. Gielen, who had Just spent a full morning's rehearsal on two movements of the Beethoven "Eroica" for a spring concert, was looking ahead. His eye, he insisted, was on some of the gaps that had existed for well over 80 years of programming for the orchestra.

He suggested the audience could "do a piece of work themselves. Music is such a Vast undertaking." Does that mean homework for the audience? "No," he allowed with a chuckle. "But when they come here, it is not just to relax. A challenge to the gray ceils." GIELEN SAID his method of programming is to develop relationships, or "at least to show existing relationships, between composers, epochs, or individual works." 1 Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the Gielen style will be the program for his third pair of concerts Oct. 3 and 4.

On that occasion, he and the orchestra will present what he calls a SchubertWebern montage, a montage of music from the master lyricist who died at the age of 31 in 1828 and Webern, the leading serial composer who died just 35 years ago. Let Gielen explain: "They're both sets of small pieces. We'll do one Schubert piece, then Webern, then Schubert. A sensitive person will note that they are both the same kind of romantic, sensitive, introverted work." He paused, smiling. "One Schubert tune" he hummed a snatch "is so used, like an old dollar bill, and it's prostituted in an operetta.

Taken out of that context, one discovers its pure beauty. The Webern pieces a few seconds, a minute for each. Then it's like a spotlight. But it has a quality of a sense of life, of sensitivity." The SchubertWebern montage Is one Gielen has used before, though he has not recorded it. "IT'S SUCH a personal thing.

It's one thing to do it in concert and provoke a response." The response to a recording could be quite different, he said. This week's concert program for the performances at Music Hall pairs works that might usually be considered quite disparate. Both the Charles Ives "Three Places in New England" and the Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 7 were written when composers were "in full vigor." The conductor feels they reflect a "strong affirmation of existence and buoyancy. For the second pair of concerts, Gielen has scheduled Bach cantatas and the "Dance Around the Golden Calf" from Arnold Schoenberg's "Moses and Aron" oratorio.

Gielen Is convinced he may have conducted the "Moses and Aron" more than anynone else. Not only has he done it for concerts, but he prepared it for a film yet to be released and a Phillips recording. "The Bach and Schoenberg seem to be many worlds apart," the conductor mused, "but on one side there is the suffering of humanity in the person of Christ And then, on the other side, Schoenberg does something very similar. All Schoenberg music is an expression of grief and suffering, commiseration with all the things that happen to the human being." THE DANCE AROUND the golden calf "is really about us today, how these people are driven to destroy their own lives. The sense that emerges Is that Moses is right and not the golden calf." At the same time, Gielen says, "Schoenberg resembles Bach in being a composer who bridges two epochs and through his equally authoritative seriousness in treating the musical material down to the last note with maximum responsibility.

Both are the key composers to their respective epochs." To emphasize the meaning, the words of Schoenberg's work will be sung in English. lM Kazimierz Kord will be CSO guest conductor. Later in the season, when Gielen returns from Europe in November, he has brought together two more unusual bed partners. For the second of those, Nov. 14 and 15, he has programmed Mozart concert arias and Mahler's Second Symphony.

An April program will follow a Mozart Sinfonla Concer-tante with the Bruckner Symphony No. 7. "Mozart is the center from where the strongest lines of force emerge, so-called Classicism and Romanticism. His greatness is the cause of neglect for Haydn," Gielen said. "AND TALKING of Haydn, let me speak for a moment about some general ideas for the future.

We shall begin to cultivate Haydn with some consequence with his last 12 symphonies, the London series, only two or three of which are really well known as a Beethoven symphony is known." Of future programming, he said: "We want to play more Bach. Mr. (Kazimierz) Kord and I will do the Brandenburg Dayton Leisure Sun Sept. 14, 1980 1 5.