Memories Of A Maestro: Katims Gave City The Sound Of Music
I suppose that what we should do first is thank Gerard Schwartz, the chief baton-wielder of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. It was Schwartz's notion, or so I'm told, that this community is long overdue in paying tribute to Milton Katims.
Schwartz will hand over the baton to guest conductor Katims April 16. This is fitting because Katims had the most to do in rebuilding the orchestra and bringing it up world-class standards.
And, as one of the world's foremost violists, Katims also will play Mozart's beautiful Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola. Joining Milton on the violin will be the Russian master, Dmitry Sitkovetsky.
It's easy to slip away from high culture's usual formality when speaking of Katims. In the 22 years he worked here, building the Seattle Symphony into one of the nation's best orchestras, a lot of us knew him as "Milt" or even "Uncle Miltie" - terms of endearment rather than disrespect.
Cab drivers called to him, "Hey, Milt!" Kids recognized him on the streets. Once, when he was emptying the garbage, a car slowed past his Laurelhurst home and a guy yelled, "Hey, Maestro, the Beethoven was wonderful tonight."
In fact, he used to play tennis wearing a "Beethoven" sweat shirt, long before monogrammed shirts were common.
He came here in 1952 as a guest conductor at the invitation of Hans Lehman. He was in the major league of music then, part of the New York scene, world renowned as a violist under Arturo Toscanini. More than 50 times he was guest conductor of the Toscanini's NBC Symphony.
He came out here three times as a guest conductor when the Seattle Symphony was not much above the "cultural dustbin" that a former guest conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, implied it was.
Seattle was musically in the backwaters in those days; there was very little community support and the orchestra, in large measure, was a part-time operation made up of school teachers, Boeing workers and housewives. The entire budget was under $200,000 annually.
So when he was offered the job of permanent conductor, Katims hesitated more than a long minute. As he was to say later: "It's one thing to guest-conduct a few concerts and get out while you're ahead. It's quite another to live with an orchestra, to build on it, and get down into the musical life of a community."
But he did. When the Katims family, Virginia and Milton and the two children, left for Seattle, the girl, Pam, asked hopefully, "Are there children out there?"
He did a number on us. When he arrived there were eight concerts a season at the old Orpheum Theater, an ancient movie house where the Westin Hotel is now. His first rehearsals were held in a union hall, the Norse Center, the gymnasium of a school and in the old Temple De Hirsch.
He expanded the season, he helped raise money, he and Virginia made personal appearances. He brought in Henry Siegel from the NBC orchestra as concert master. A former symphony conductor, Eugene Linden told him, "You'll never last in Seattle - you're too nice."
But he went ahead, expanding concerts - a Sunday afternoon series to introduce promising young artists; family concerts (with the help of Lucille Linden and Ruth McCreery) in 15 urban and suburban neighborhoods.
Virginia brainstormed the "Symfunics" (a subscription series for young singles) and "Wids and Divs" (for widows, widowers and divorcees) and he brought in artists like Isaac Stern, Ravi Shankar, Leonard Ross and dozens of others.
He would do anything, it seemed, to put the orchestra and himself out front, to broaden the city's appreciation of fine music. He and Virginia spearheaded the campaign to pass a bond issue for the Opera House. They spoke at every gathering, every coffee hour, because, he believed, "public visibility was crucial."
He was a showman, too. He got good reviews when he gave away cough drops at concerts to keep the hackers quiet. When the Washington Huskies won the Rose Bowl of 1960, he offered quarterback Bob Schloredt his baton and invited the kid to conduct the orchestra. He once played a match of table tennis onstage with a visiting star, Leon Fleisher.
All of this and more: the Seattle Symphony now began to travel - to California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. In 1973 and 1974, the symphony played in 35 Alaska communities in six days, a trick Milton achieved by dividing the orchestra into nine different ensembles.
With the help of a $50,000 grant from the Davis Foundation and
money from PONCHO, the Katims-conducted SS0 made its first recordings, for RCA Victor, CBS and Vox.
Once, when a grumpy moneybags gave him the old line, "Let those interested in your kind of music support the symphony," Katims asked him, "Do you pay taxes?" When the man replied, of course he paid taxes, Milton responded, "Your taxes keep up the city jail - when did you last use it?"
When he found out, to his horror, that the city contributed nothing to the symphony but extracted $7,500 in admission taxes from his concerts, Milton went down to City Hall and confronted Council President Dave Levine.
Levine said, in effect, "I'll get the $7,500 back to you, even if I have to do it under the table." When Levine delivered on his promise, Katims used the money to give free concerts to all fourth-graders in the city.
He became such a pervasive presence in the community, such a force, that he was sometimes taken for granted and people tended to forget how good Milton Katims really was.
He was recognized as one of the few top-drawer American-born conductors (most were European) and he guest-conducted most of the outstanding orchestras in this country - as well as in Europe, Israel, Japan and China.
At the Shanghai Conservatory, he was honored with a full professorship. He was largely responsible for the birth of the Seattle Opera Association.
Neil Morgan, the San Diego columnist, called Katims "the Leonard Bernstein of the West." A Philadelphia critic described him as "the Pablo Casals of the viola" and the same critic, listing his "ideal all-time symphony orchestra," named Toscanini as conductor, Paganini as concertmaster, Casals for solo cellist and Katims for first viola.
It might be noted here that 34 members of the present orchestra were with Katims during many of those 22 years. After leaving Seattle, Katims was for eight years artistic director of the University of Houston School of Music.
But he is at home now, very much a part of the Seattle community, living near Sand Point. Virginia probably said it best about the maestro: "He long ago fell in love with Mount Rainier."
Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.