Leinsdorf: Rare Visit by Outspoken Conductor

“There’s nothing I need that requires me to polish apples. And it follows that I can be as disagreeable as I like, without taking a single risk.”

So says Erich Leinsdorf, who never minces his words. The dean of outspoken conductors, he tells the truth as he sees and hears it, even to the point of admitting that “I look at the world only from my own vantage point.”

But that perspective often bears valuable answers to the problems everyone grapples with in music. So when Leinsdorf speaks, people listen.

Here to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two programs, the first series beginning tonight, he gladly holds forth--mollified by the balmy weather, fussed over by the management at his Beverly Hills hotel.

The venerable maestro who, at 77, has been described as a dour Kapellmeister, has spent the last two decades guest-conducting the world’s leading orchestras. Mightily picky about where he conducts, he touches down in this country at the podia of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.

And here to conduct a curious program emphasizing the number 3 with Roy Harris’ Symphony No. 3, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, Debussy’s “Trois Nocturnes” and Three Pieces from Berlioz’s “Damnation de Faust,” he quips: “I didn’t consult an astrologist.”

Controversy continues to be his calling card. And along the way he issues pithy rules of the musical game:

* On programming: “No party pieces, no war horses, no fashion music.”

* On his own conducting--without a baton: “Why use a stick if I can’t promise a carrot?”

* On others conducting: “If you don’t have perfect pitch don’t even bother.”

The most recent serious issue before him concerns Milton Babbitt’s “Transfigured Notes,” commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and scheduled to have its premiere in 1987 under Leinsdorf.

“It’s not a pleasant story,” he says, narrowing his eyes and looking like a wizened imp. “I accepted (the assignment) conditionally; no pig in the poke for me. But after studying the score--maybe it should have been titled ‘Verklarte Nicht’ (“Transfigured Not”),” he says with a laugh, in appreciation of his pun--”I knew it could not be done.

“An arrogant pronouncement on my part, right? Well, that’s what the peacekeeper types in Philadelphia thought. So they next sent the score to Dennis Russell Davies, who rehearsed it for a week before the management withdrew it again. There was such a brouhaha that Davies lost his entire association with the orchestra.

“And this past November they made yet another try, with Hans Vonk, a modern music specialist. Failure again. A total of 18 hours to rehearse a 19-minute piece. That’s 60 times the norm. My assessment, it turns out, was not an opinion, but a clearly demonstrable fact.”

The symphony orchestra, says Leinsdorf, is tied to tonality. It cannot play the diabolically complex music characterized by dodecaphony. Anything beyond Debussy, he insists, breeds alienation of players and audiences.

But he doesn’t blame Babbitt, who, he avows, is “a thoroughly outstanding composer of music that takes no account of the public.”

So who is the culprit?

“I accuse the commission committees,” says Leinsdorf, without a moment’s hesitation. “They have no excuse. They go to the wrong people. Any person who can read a score--and he is among an endangered species--will spot one that is unplayable by massed choirs of instruments. And yet these are the ones being commissioned.”

The problem, as he sees it, involves the advent of the composer-in-residence, “now a powerful lobby.” But the maestro concedes that such commissions have an undeniable allure.

It is the symphony orchestra, he suggests, that offers the most publicity, recognition and revenue. “One can’t fault the recipient of a commission or tell him not to take it.”

Still, Leinsdorf shrinks from leading the revolution. “I’m not the ethics committee of music. It’s not my place to tell composers that they’re barking up the wrong tree, even though their alienation of the public is serious.”

In the best of all possible worlds, according to the Viennese maestro, post-Schoenbergian composers would receive commissions from specialty chamber orchestras, ensembles with sensibilities keen enough to perform Babbitt and his brethren.

He cites Koussevitzky, 60 years ago at the Boston Symphony, for “knowing what composers to tap”--Stravinsky, Ravel, Gershwin, Prokofiev, Copland--but doesn’t account for the fact that such music is not being written today.

Making these pronouncements is par for the Leinsdorf course. It was long ago that he gave up being an organization man in order to exercise what he calls his First Amendment rights--the freedom to do and say as he chooses.

As director of the Boston Symphony during the ‘60s, he received a letter from a rabbi in Brookline, “advising me not to conduct Bach’s ‘St. John’ Passion because its text was anti-Semitic.”

“I knew instantly that this was my signal to leave. Censorship and compromise do not work for me. Besides, they take too many victims--the latest incident being the one with Vanessa Redgrave (who sued the Boston Symphony for canceling her contract as a narrator). The orchestra manager lost his job over that one.”

But Leinsdorf knows how to mind his manners. He demurs when asked what he made of the Previn resignation.

“I don’t criticize the soup as a dinner guest,” he says, referring to the tiff between Previn and his (Leinsdorf’s) host, Philharmonic executive director Ernest Fleischmann, with whom he has buried the hatchet. (They had an altercation six years ago when Leinsdorf thought he had been shorted over rehearsal time.)

“But I’ll issue an equation that holds for orchestras, operas or ballet companies:

“There are three players--the chairman of the board or president, the executive or managing director, the artistic director. When two band together the third one is out, regardless of reasons. If the situation lasts, it’s because this has not happened.

“Take it from one who can’t help discussing the soup just a little.”