>From the Toronto "Globe and Mail", March 10:

   Baton-slinger Tintner honoured in Halifax Conductor praised for superb
   Bruckner cycle

   Wednesday, March 10, 1999
   DAVID LASKER
   Special to The Globe and Mail

   Toronto -- Yesterday morning at Province House in Halifax, Nova Scotia
   Premier Russell MacLellan awarded the $25,000 Portia White Prize to
   Georg Tintner, conductor laureate of Symphony Nova Scotia.  The prize
   -- named for Portia White (1911-1968), a schoolteacher in Halifax's
   Africville district who became an internationally renowned contralto
   -- is given annually by the Nova Scotia Arts Council to recognize
   cultural excellence in the province.

   Born in Vienna in 1917, Tintner has gained world attention in his
   autumn years for his ongoing cycle of late-19th-century Austrian
   composer Anton Bruckner's symphonies and masses, recorded for the
   budget label Naxos.  Sweden's Musik And Ljudteknik declared in August,
   "Tintner's [Bruckner Sixth] is the most satisfactory version on record
   ever." The New York Times wrote that his Fifth "is among the most
   lucid and radiant to be found on disks." And in January, Titner's
   visage graced the cover of Britain's Gramophone, the world's pre-eminent
   record-review magazine.

   In his own time, Bruckner let well-meaning students and conductors
   tamper with his difficult symphonies to make them more acceptable to
   the public, so his works are available in a farrago of editions.
   Tintner has gone back to the originals.

   "My main guidance in my Bruckner cycle is that I do not consider
   him 'a genius without talent,' as Mahler said," Tintner commented
   in a telephone interview from Halifax, where he lives with his wife,
   journalist Tanya Buchdahl.  "I do exactly what Bruckner wrote, without
   the interference of others."

   Tintner joined the Vienna Boys Choir when he was 9, and at 13 he
   entered the Vienna State Academy, where he studied with the legendary
   Felix von Weingartner.  "He conducted the Brahms symphonies in front
   of Brahms and told us what Brahms said," Tintner recalled.

   Tintner was appointed assistant conductor at the Vienna Volksoper
   when he was 19, but in 1938 he fled from the Nazis and finally arrived
   in New Zealand, where he became music director of the Auckland String
   Players and Choral Society.  There followed stints with Australian
   Opera, Sadler's Wells (now the English National Opera), Symphony Nova
   Scotia and seven summers with Canada's National Youth Orchestra.  He
   has recorded for CBC, Philips and BMG/RCA.

   Unlike many conductors today, Tintner does not seek the limelight.
   "I think the conductor has to do the best he can to express what the
   composer intended.  I don't think he needs to drive in a Rolls-Royce
   or be particularly fashionable."

   Nor does Tintner admire the jet-setting lifestyle that has become
   the norm for conductors with simultaneous posts in several cities.
   "I don't think a conductor should have more than one full-time job
   because he can't do his best.  This has to do with why I stayed so
   long in Halifax and Australia."

   His Bruckner cycle is shared by three orchestras (in Ireland, Scotland
   and New Zealand), and its sense of continuity is amazing.  "I don't
   mean to seem arrogant, but every conductor has his own sort of sound
   that he takes with himself wherever he goes."

   Tintner is booked to conduct in Australia and Japan in the near
   future, and hopes to record works by the Viennese late-Romantics
   Schmidt and Pfitzner, but engagements are not pouring in.  It doesn't
   help that he no longer has a podium to trade with visiting conductors.
   "So far, the doors haven't opened very quickly.  One has to be very
   patient.  And it's difficult to be patient when you are nearly 82
   years old."

Joanne and Phil Stevens,
Ottawa, Canada
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