Last Saturday I attended a rehearsal during which Andre Previn muscled the Munich Philharmonic through Dmitri Mitropouls's orchestra version of Beethoven's string quartet No. 14 in c sharp minor. I had never experienced this piece before and was surprised how little it sounded like Beethoven. It left me wondering whether the sound was Mitropoulos. I think the trouble was that the color a string orchestra simply can't accomodate the demand for a very sharply chiselled sound in the piece's address-and-response passages--something that in the true quartet version two instruments ahve much less trouhble in doing. Anyway, the fault was surely not with Previn who revealed himslef as a no-nonsense conductor of the old (German) school, very demanding in rehearsal and implacabale in determination. Moreover, he expressed his orders clearly in native-sounding (north-) German. From the piano stool he also conducted Mozart's piano concerto KV 491. Excellent Zusammenspile with the orchestra, despite a rather mechanical performance on the piano. Denis Fodor