51�Թ�

In Minneapolis, he will head an orchestra whose past music directors include Eugene Ormandy, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Antal Dorati, Neville Marriner and Edo de Waart.

Consult the recorded legacy he has left with the BIS label, one at least equal in stature to those of predecessors including Dimitri Mitropoulos and Antal Dorati, and it would be difficult to disagree.

The agency, founded in December 1930, has represented many of the leading conductors, among them Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, James Levine, Eugene Ormandy, Antal Dorati and Otto Klemperer.

Just three years later, Byron Janis, another young American, recorded the concerto with Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra, a performance some Rachmaninoff devotees consider even better.

After graduating in 1963 from the Curtis Institute, the elite music conservatory in Philadelphia, he was principal clarinetist with the Milwaukee Symphony and taught at Oberlin College in Ohio before Antal Dorati, then the music director of the NSO, hired him in 1970.