IT WAS IN ONE OF THOSE ENORMOUS apartments that used to be so plentiful on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, especially around Seventy-Second or Eighty-Sixth Street, that I was ushered into a large, richly carpeted living room. It was virtually empty except for some high-backed chairs, tables, and lamps; around the perimeter were large earthen jars with flowers, and at one end a huge baronial fireplace. On the far side of the room stood a seven-foot grand piano, loaded with piles of scores. Oddest of all, and unexpected in a living room, was a large crib at one end, with a sleeping baby inside. For a moment I thought I was in the wrong place, but a maid ushered me to a chair near the piano, indicating that the maestro would be with me right away. That “right away” turned out to be nearly twenty minutes, and the maestro was Antal Dorati.

I was in Dorati's apartment to audition for the position of second horn in the thirty-piece Ballet Theatre touring orchestra. My friend, Arthur Holmes (from the Manhattan School of Music), it turned out, was first horn, and had recommended me to Dorati when the previous second horn player, Lester Solomon, had been drafted into the army. After sitting there awhile, nervously wondering when Dorati was going to appear, I quietly unpacked my horn—eager not to wake the sleeping baby—and after a while got up the courage to investigate what was on the piano's music rack. To my delight I saw the score of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, opened to the middle of the first movement, a piece I had loved and studied ever since I had bought Stokowski's wonderful 1937 recording four years earlier.

Just then Dorati walked in, dressed in a beautiful maroon bathrobe. (It was around nine in the morning). “Ah,” he said, in his high-pitched voice and slight Hungarian accent, “you see what I am studying. Do you like Shostakovich?” Nervously: “Oh yes, I have loved that piece for many years.” A bit puzzled, he asked: “Oh, so do you compose?” “Yes, sir.” “Good for you!”

As nervous as I was—one almost always is at auditions, and this was my first real big audition— I felt I had already won round one.