Associated Press AP-NY-03-08-97 1532EST

Protest for Vienna Philharmonic

By RONALD BLUM Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Change does not come easily to the Vienna Philharmonic.

Eight days after admitting its first woman, there was the orchestra, up on stage at Carnegie Hall, not a female in sight.

Friday night's program -- Beethoven's Sixth and Fifth Symphonies, and his Egmont Overture as an encore -- didn't require Anna Lelkes, the 57-year-old harpist admitted Feb. 27 by the self-governing musicians. That left 80 or so male colleagues in their tailcoats, gazing at the baton of conductor Daniel Barenboim.

So what the sellout crowd saw was a relic -- the last all-male major orchestra in the world.

"Testosterone is not an instrument," read one of the signs among the three dozen protesters on front of the auditorium on 57th Street.

Fifteen years after the Berlin Philharmonic -- Europe's other premier orchestra -- dropped its sex barrier, the Vienna ensemble promises to follow suit. But the protesters are worried the 155-year-old Austrian institution won't change its practices.

Mrs. Lelkes started playing with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1971, when the orchestra couldn't find a suitable male harpist. But she was not listed in a program until a 1995 U.S. tour and was not allowed to become a voting member until the day before the orchestra embarked on its current concert swing to Paris; London; Costa Mesa, Calif.; and New York.

Auditions will be held in June for a tuba, a trumpet, a double bass and a solo viola. But while major U.S. orchestras place musicians behind screens during auditions to hide their identities, Vienna doesn't use screens. Since that method of auditioning came into practice in the early 1970s, the percentage of women in the big five U.S. orchestras has climbed from 5 percent to about 25 percent.

So, for now, the Vienna -- which also supplies the pit orchestra for the Vienna State Opera -- is often a completely male body. Because many compositions do not require a harp, the only appearance by Mrs. Lelkus during three New York concerts will be Sunday, during Richard Strauss' "Ein Heldenleben."

The sex of the musicians aside, the Vienna remains traditional in its interpretations of Beethoven. Both of the symphonies performed at Carnegie had their premieres at Vienna's Theater an der Wien on Dec. 22, 1808.

Barenboim, the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, favored an expansive approach, allowing individual instruments to be heard even as they blended to form Vienna's famous burnished sound.

He did this, however, at the expense of emotion. Only when the orchestra was playing at forte levels -- during the final movements of both symphonies -- did it produce the tension that makes for dramatic Beethoven.

The Vienna Philharmonic does not have a permanent music director, instead hiring the best conductors in the world. As a result, it bends its sound to the wishes of the musician on the podium, while never losing its traditional deep strings.

Some of Vienna's musicians have complained that admitting women will change that dynamic, a claim most outsiders dismiss as nonsense. An institution that focuses on works of the 18th and 19th centuries clearly is having problems dealing with change in a society approaching the 21st.

Copyright 1997 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Op Ed
Los Angeles Times Orange County Edition
Sunday, March 9, 1997
[no byline]

Orange County Perspective

VIENNA PLAYS TO AMERICAN TUNE

U.S. protests, principles compel orchestra to accept women.

The anticipated arrival of the VPO on these shores drew international attention to more than its renown as an orchestra. The threat of boycotts and demonstrations in OC and in NYC let to the admission of Feb. 27 of the all-male orchestra's first woman and to a vote to audition others beginning this summer.

The orchestra's first concert at the OC Performing Arts Center Tuesday night was met with about 80 demonstrators who presented their case with a very civilized fiddle and flute. They petitioned the VPO to hire women, and generally, in the words of one protest leader, "to join the 20th centry."

The vote granting membership to harpist Anna Lelkes, who had played with the orchestra for 26 years but had never been named as a full member, was a modest start. That was so, even if the orchestra's gesture was, as the harpist suggested, a bow to pressure exerted by American activists.

Even as the door was ostensibly opened to participation by more women, critics noted that auditioning procedures still would pose potential obstacles to further hirings, and there were other charges that the orchestra also discriminates against ethnic minorities.

The assertion of the orchestra that its sound resulted from it's "homogeneity" was greeted with skepticism, and there was even a touch of irony in Times music critic Mark Swed's conclusion after Tuesday night's concert (absent Lelkes) that Mozart's Symphony No. 29 sounded "so polished as to seem like the most precious of fine alabaster, not the work of a feisty young man dazzling Vienna with the newness of his inventions." We have all learned a thing or two in recent weeks about tradition and its limitations.

In the US of the late 1990s, we celebrate our pluralism. As much as we would like others who share our aesthetic sensibilities to also share our democratic instincts, we find that ideals still must compete with other values in the world's marketplace of culture.

However modest the gesture of hiring a woman might have been for the orchestra, ultimately this was a story about the influence of American principles on a larger world.

The New York Times
Tuesday, March 11, 1997
Page C13

A Women in Its Ranks, the Band Plays On

By BERNARD HOLLAND

After the politics, there is the music. Women's groups provided the first last week; in three concerts at Carnegie Hall over the weekend, the Vienna Philharmonic gave us the second. Beforehand, music was turned into a peripheral event. Emphatic calls from American and international women's groups had demanded that the Vienna Philharmonic end its all-male ways; and, in what may or not be a capitulation, the orchestra put a longtime harpist on its payroll and announced open auditions in the future.

Pickets were still promised, and they were there: usually about 15 in number, quiet, friendly and positively sedate next to the aggressive television crews swirling around them. It was not the image of righteous indignation one was led to expect, but maybe the real indignation lay not with this matronly crew, but with working musicians out making a living in other concert halls.

Perhaps I should feel guilty for enjoying the concerts so much; but when the doors were closed and the people in their seats, musicians and music took over. Can we separate beauty like this from the ethics involved? Should we? In the face of such glorious orchestra playing, it was hard not to.

Indeed, Beethoven's "Pastorale" Symphony on Friday night was ineffably beautiful whether its performers were misogynists and xenophobes or not. Bruckner's Ninth Symphony was on Saturday's program. Do we, like certain musicologists, infer Nazism from its mighty martial brass and vast melodic outpourings? I hope not. Presumptuous academic silliness might win a few grants and sponsor a conference or two, but Bruckner sounded an awful lot like Bruckner on this occasion, not at all like a

[to Page C15]
sideboxed: A new era for the Vienna's traditionalists. Now, was that so painful?

Panzer column. If we want to attach negatives with real adhesive strength, conservatism and its harsher synonym, reaction, work best. For this is a conservative orchestra in every way. Historically, the three programs began with Mozart and, with Strauss' "Heldenleben" on Sunday, stopped short, in apparent horror, at the prospect of entering our own century.

Mozart's delicate A Major Symphony (K. 201) was rolled out on a cushion of blurry loveliness. For the Viennese, there is no early-music movement; short phrases, astringent textures, fast tempos and strong separations of timbre may exist on Mars but not on the banks of the Danube.

But if this orchestra is limited, its strengths are in its limits. So many Vienna Philharmonic string players are sons of Vienna Philharmonic string players. I know of no other set of musicians whose values and passions are so intimately shared. One hears this not only in the depth and color but also in the quiet, confident approach to a style mutually agreed on. The Vienna's differences from other orchestras are fragile, and one can only hope that questions of social inequity can be resolved without damage.

A characteristic sense of calm inhabited both the "Pastorale" and the Mozart. Daniel Barenboim, who conducted all three concerts, was rarely in a hurry. The minuetto of the Mozart was leisure itself; accents nuzzled into strong beats rather than attacking them. If one listened carefully through the overall glow, the crossing meters of the "Pastorale" emerged clearly.

Barenboim wisely allowed the Vienna Philharmonic to impose its style on him. The Bruckner and Strauss, with their elaborate transitions and many instruments, are conductor's pieces, and this conductor took charge handsomely. Elsewhere Barenboim was like the driver of a well-tuned car. No need to look under the hood: just steer judiciously, stay within the white lines, slow down at the curves.

Barenboim was his own pianist for Beethoven's C Major Concerto on Sunday. More calm marked the first movement: The impatient squirmed; others were charmed. The second movement took its "largo" marking dead seriously, escalating the leisurely to the downright sleepy. The last movement, hectic and out of breath, contradicted the two others. It was a curious performance by a wonderful pianist. Werner Hink played the violin solos in the Strauss.

CyberTimes (New York Times)
arts@large
STRUNG UP by Matthew Mirapau

The inmates of the all-male asylum known as the Vienna Philharmonic, in a bout of temporary sanity, have agreed to admit women as players for the first time in the institution's 155-year history. The decision comes on the eve of the orchestra's three sold-out performances this weekend at Carnegie Hall, and follows the launch of an online protest site and a vigorous campaign by the International Alliance for Women in Music, who deserve a gold coin for their efforts.

"The Internet played a very important role," said Regina Himmelbauer, an IAWM board member who teaches music in Vienna. "For us, it was very important to build our protests on first-hand information. We collected (articles and other information) with the help of friendly supporters, then exchanged them via e-mail, forwarded them to the media, and analyzed them and discussed strategies. So within a very short time we could react quickly on the developments here in Austria and vice versa. I think that is why the VPO got so nervous; at first they could not imagine that the organizers of the protests in the U.S.A. were so well-informed."

Vienna Prompts Less Protest in N.Y.

By JAN HERMAN, Times Staff Writer

The men in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra outnumbered female protesters over the weekend in three sold-out concerts at New York's Carnegie Hall, where the orchestra concluded its U.S. tour Sunday.

Between two dozen and three dozen demonstrators showed up each of the three nights to protest the orchestra's 155-year, all-male tradition, which was overturned recently with the admission of a female harpist.

The opening program Friday--Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth symphonies, with an encore of the Egmont Overture--made use of about 80 musicians onstage: all men. Daniel Barenboim conducted.

Harpist Anna Lelkes, who made history Feb. 27 when she was voted into the orchestra, appeared in Sunday's concert during one piece, Richard Strauss' "Ein Heldenleben." She had played in the same piece Wednesday during the orchestra's tour stop at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Protesters who gathered in near-freezing temperatures were herded away from the Carnegie Hall entrance by police, said Monique Buzzarte, a board member of the International Alliance for Women in Music, which mounted the demonstration with the National Organization for Women and several union locals of the American Federation of Musicians.

Buzzarte said that a trombone quartet, which had been organized to serenade arriving concert-goers on the sidewalk outside Carnegie Hall, was prevented from playing by the police.

"The city would not give us a sound permit," Buzzarte said. "The police told us that if we played without a permit, they would have to confiscate our instruments."

When the Vienna Philharmonic appeared last week in Costa Mesa, the only other U.S. stop on its tour, roughly 80 protesters turned out for a peaceful demonstration. It was highlighted by a musical duet, violinist Mitchell Newman, a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and flutist Phyllis Newman, his mother.

It wasn't only the demonstration outside Carnegie Hall that drew little notice.

Buzzarte said that concerts scheduled over the weekend at CAMI Hall across the street from Carnegie, which had been designed to celebrate women composers, were sparsely attended.

"But we did give out about 5,000 fliers during the demonstrations and the concerts," she added. "So we think we did some good educating the public about the plight of women in music."