By Allan Kozinn

“I am a New Yorker,” Kurt Masur said over lunch one afternoon recently, turning around John F. Kennedy’s famous statement of solidarity with the citizens of Berlin. “I have a feeling for the city, for the people here. I feel very attracted to this colorful life.”

Masur was just about to begin his second season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, and that day he was right in the thick of the “colorful life.” That morning, he had joined officials of Lincoln Center and the orchestra to announce the details of a renovation of the stage of Avery Fisher Hall, the Philharmonic’s acoustically troubled home, in time for the Philharmonic’s !50th-anniversary season, 1992-93. After facing a group of critics who did not share his faith that a stage revamp would solve the hall’s problems, he changed into concert dress to sit for some publicity photos. An interview followed, and then an informal meeting or two before he was free for the day.

Indeed, the pace of the city and the job he has undertaken seem to have energized the 65-year-old Masur, who had been considering retiring as music director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig and taking up a freelance career before the Philharmonic offer came. Now he is directing both orchestras. Masur, in turn, has enlivened the Philharmonic, getting it to play with greater warmth and consistency than it has in many years, sparking the interest of the sometimes apathetic New York audience and winning enthusiastic reviews all through his first season. Actually, the orchestra’s celebratory 150th season was to have been his first season as director, but he decided to take up his directorial tasks a year earlier than he had originally planned. At the same time, he is overseeing his Leipzig orchestra’s 250th-anniversary season.

He has quickly made his mark on the history of America’s oldest symphony orchestra. As soon as he took the reins, he revamped the orchestra’s management and helped work through a complicated labor negotiation in which the musicians won a say in the Philharmonic’s affairs. He made himself available for public question-and-answer sessions, which he called “Philharmonic Forums.” He lobbied for the current round of acoustical alterations in Avery Fisher Hall-and for the installation of a pipe organ, a point he has not yet won—and even conducted his own experiments with makeshift reflecting panels. And he revived the orchestra’s recording career, which, at least in matters of standard repertory, had foundered since the early Mehta years.

Musical accomplishments aside—and those are not inconsiderable—Masur’s thorough makeover of one of this country’s major musical institutions makes him an ideal choice for Musical America’s Musician of the Year.

There are some lessons to be learned from Masur’s quick run of successes. One is that preconceptions can crumble quickly. In April 1990, when the Philharmonic announced that it had signed on the German conductor, there was more than a little surprise in the music world. The conventional wisdom held that the Philharmonic would hold out for a flashy, youngish—well, middle-aged, perhaps—media star who would bring the impression of glamor and excitement to Avery Fisher Hall, as Mehta did at the start of his term, but without rocking the boat, as Mehta’s predecessors Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez were wont to do.

To this end, there was talk of Claudio Abbado, who looked like a sure thing until the Berlin Philharmonic beckoned. There were reports of discussions with Colin Davis, Leonard Slatkin, and Charles Dutoit. Now and then one heard fantasies of the return of Leonard Bernstein, whose tenure with the Philharmonic was coming to be seen as a golden age. But except for some speculation about a triumvirate involving Bernstein, Davis, and Masur, there was hardly a clue that Masur was being considered until the announcement.

And indeed, the day his appointment was announced, Masur—who was in Paris to conduct a performance of the St. Matthew Passion—told an interviewer from the New York Times that he was as taken aback as anyone by the offer of the podium.

“I met with some of the board members and management in Salzburg, and straight away they offered me the post,” he said that day. “This was 10 days ago. My connection with the Philharmonic had grown more and more into a kind of friendship since I first conducted it [in 1981]. But I had always spoken very freely with them about the fact that the orchestra’s full capacity is not always used. So I was surprised when they decided that together we might discover some ways to improve the quality of this wonderful orchestra and to provide a steadier musical life for its audience.”

There were some doubters who, on the basis of Masur’s recordings with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and some of his guest-conducting appearances, had come to regard him as a workmanlike but not especially dynamic conductor. But his first season in New York has shown that judgment to have been hasty. There have been some luminous performances—one that comes to mind is his Dvorák “New World,” captured on one of the Philharmonic’s first recordings for the Teldec label, which is taping some of the orchestra’s concert performances for release on CD.

There have been some compelling programs, as well. One of last year’s ear-openers was a pairing of the Beethoven “Eroica” and Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, works with connections that are both musical (the Strauss quotes the Beethoven) and extra-musical (the Beethoven is a treatise on the heroic ideal; Strauss’s 1945 work is a reflection on the devastation of German culture and the brutality of the Nazi regime).

This season has several thematic programs, including one that brings together works with folk and popular currents (Kodaly, Gershwin, Mussorgsky), another that posits the Beethoven Ninth Symphony as the answer to Ives’s Unanswered Question, and one that is as sharp-edged as the Beethoven/Strauss: a juxtaposition of Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony and H’un, a searing evocation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Bright Sheng, a young composer from Shanghai who now lives in New York. Masur is taking the Sheng on the Philharmonic’s European tour this spring.

“I want the audience to know that if we have chosen a work, it is worth hearing,” Masur said of his Philharmonic programming. “I want them to know that they can trust us—that if they come to the hall, they will have something to take home. If they trust us, I can build up their understanding about why we have chosen this contemporary piece, or this unknown piece, or this lesser-known composer.”

His own specialties have always been the Romantics: On recordings and in the concert hall, he has always been at his best in works like Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Grieg’s Peer Gynt, and the Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky symphonies. A comparison of his recent set of Mendelssohn symphonies, on Teldec, with the set he recorded for Eurodisc in the early 1970s shows tremendous growth in flexibility and communicativeness.

He has also championed contemporary composers of his homeland, most notably Siegfried Matthus. And he has turned his gaze on American music, if a bit gingerly. Last year’s season opener, meant to be a bridge between the American and German traditions, juxtaposed short works by Aaron Copland and John Adams with the Bruckner Seventh. This season’s opening gala was heavily adorned with Bernstein theater music.

“Ja, ja, of course,” he said when the subject of new American music came up recently. “I have looked at a mountain of scores. When I see a score I like very much and think I can do well, I will conduct it. But also, very often I see a score that I think is of very high quality but which I think may be better done by someone else. John Corigliano’s Symphony No.1 is an example. I could have done that. It’s a fantastic piece. But we knew that Leonard Slatkin had done the piece, and that he had done it well, so we asked him to do it. I think that’s the best way. It’s stupid to try to show that you can do everything. Nobody can, yes? And this way the listeners are given a wider repertory, which is much more important to me than showing my own focus.”

The career path that has brought Masur to New York is odd only in that its entirely conventional beginning has led to some fascinating recent twists. He was born in Brieg, Silesia, on July 18, 1927, and began his musical studies as a cellist and pianist at the National Music School in Breslau in 1942. When he moved to the Leipzig Conservatory in 1946, he added composition and conducting to the program, and he found his first professional post two years later, when he was hired as a rehearsal coach at the Halle National Theater.

He took the standard route for a young German conductor: He worked his way through regional opera houses, including companies in Leipzig and Erfurt in the early 1950s. His first directorship came in 1958, when he was put in charge of the Mecklenburg State Opera Theater of Schwerin. And he began to attract international notice in 1960, when he was appointed music director of the Komische Opera in Berlin. In 1964, though, Masur resolved to devote himself to symphonic conducting. He was chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic from 1967 to 1972 (he had also worked with the orchestra in the mid-1950s). But the decision that made his career was his move to Leipzig in 1970. The orchestra he inherited then was a solid, provincial, East German ensemble with a glorious history: Masur’s predecessors include Mendelssohn, Nikisch, Furtwängler, and Walter. But its tradition had been shattered by World War II and had not fully recovered.

Masur transformed the orchestra into an ensemble of international caliber and shaped it into a huge organization that employed some 200 musicians. On any given evening, 100 might be playing an orchestral concert. Others might be working in an opera pit or playing chamber music, and still others might be performing at the Thomaskirche, the church where Bach presided. In formal terms, by the mid-1980s, the Gewandhaus had become an umbrella orchestra from which had sprung three chamber orchestras, nine string quartets, three wind quintets, three original-instrument groups, and several brass ensembles.

With the orchestra so thoroughly enmeshed in Leipzig’s cultural life, and with Masur as its guiding force, it was perhaps not unnatural that when the East German government began to crumble, in 1989, Masur emerged as a civic leader. As a founder of the New Forum, an opposition group, he had a hand in fomenting the popular protests against the government; but he also counseled against violence. There was even talk of his running for president of East Germany, before the two parts of the country were rejoined.

“I got into politics unwillingly,” the bearded, bear-like conductor said at the time of his Philharmonic appointment, laughing off the prospect of running for president. “But I had to, because I have a solid, provincial, East German some influence in the city, and I thought it very important that we avoid bloodshed. It was our feeling that the government should know what the ordinary people wanted for the future. And we wanted to protest against the closed borders.

“At first, it seemed hopeless to find someone the people trusted. We did not know what the future would be. We did not have a multiparty system. So we had this idea of a free democracy, and I said, okay, I could lead it if it was only to be for a brief time. I imagined I could do it besides conducting. But when it became clear that we needed a president who would do it as a profession, at that moment I said I could not be considered. I already have a wonderful profession.”

Oddly enough, one of the main qualities that Masur brings to the New York Philharmonic—and one of the qualities that may be helping him transform it—is one that by any logic should be useless in New York: He came to the orchestra with the sensibility of a European music director whose work was a central thread in the life of his city. By contrast, an American orchestra, even one as old as the Philharmonic, battles against the fact that classical music has always been the province of a cultivated minority and is unlikely ever to be the lingua franca of American cultural life.

Masur may not consider this a trifling distinction, but he does not regard it as insurmountable, either. His Philharmonic Forums are an attempt to re-create the kind of public dialogues he has in Leipzig and to foster the impression of the orchestra, and its director, as approachable.

He has extended the orchestra’s reach beyond its traditional New York venues—Avery Fisher Hall during the season and free concerts in the city’s parks during the summer—to include an all-Tchaikovsky series at Carnegie Hall and a Britten War Requiem at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. And he has instituted special “rush hour” and “casual” concerts, shorter programs at earlier hours, for listeners who want to flirt with the orchestra without fully committing to it.

To hear him talk, Masur would be happy to have the Philharmonic all over town, all the time, much as the Gewandhaus players are in Leipzig. He even, in one informal discussion with a group of New York music critics, fantasized freely about the idea of a regular Philharmonic radio program that would carry rehearsals and interviews, particularly when the orchestra was about to give the premiere of a new work. Given the currently popsy inclination of New York’s classical radio stations, such a scheme seems out of the question. But who knows? Masur can be surprisingly persuasive.

Beyond grand plans, of course, Masur came to New York with more basic changes in mind.

“When I have listened to the New York Philharmonic,” he said the day his appointment was announced, “I have thought, here are wonderful players who can play fantastically—but not every day. And I tried to discover why not. And one reason, I think, is that the chamber-music activity is so much less than what we have at the Gewandhaus. In Leipzig, the collaboration between the musicians, even outside their duties to the orchestra, is enormous. And I believe that if we establish activity of this sort with the New York Philharmonic, they will have the feeling of being a family. They would know what it means to make not only thrilling and exciting music, but also a warm, human sound.

“I believe I have enough experience to build up a good relationship with an orchestra,” he added when asked if the Philharmonic’s reputation as a conductor- killer bothered him. “I believe that most musicians who know me know that in rehearsal I am quite tough. But I am still a friend.”

He does seem to have forged the kind of relationship he described. During the labor negotiations of 1991 and early 1992, he gave the players at least moral support, turning up at chamber concerts the musicians gave in order to get their message across to the orchestra’s supporters and fans. The musicians, during that tense period, had nothing but kind words for him, and some said that one of their regrets about the possibility of a strike was that it would leave a mark on Masur’s first season. It didn’t come to that. One reason things have gone as smoothly as they have is that Masur has been decisive in choosing his management team. Nick Webster, the Philharmonic’s managing director through the Mehta years, resigned a few months after Masur was appointed, and after a brief search, the orchestra replaced him with Deborah Borda. Borda had held managerial positions in Minnesota, Detroit, and San Francisco, and Masur had been impressed with her when he met her in San Francisco in the late 1970s.

Borda and Masur filled out the team first by promoting Allison Vulgamore—one of the few to remain from the old administration—to general manager, putting her in charge of personnel, educational programs, and the day-to-day running of the orchestra, and then hiring Elizabeth Ostrow as music administrator. Ostrow was in charge of artists and repertory at New World Records for many years, and had similar responsibilities at Angel when the Philharmonic lured her away.

“Mr. Masur calls us his amazons,” Borda says. “We all think of this as an ideal way to work. We respect his authority as the Maestro, but he recognizes that this is a partnership. He likes being part of a team.”

It is no different in Leipzig, says Masur. “There is no other way than to have somebody whose knowledge of the repertory is strong, and who has open ears for the reactions of the audience, the critics, and everyone who knows about music. I have had this cooperation all my life, ever since I was music director at the Schwerin State Opera House, when I was 30 years old. I like having people who give me advice, or who recommend new works that they think I should look at. It is not possible to do everything by yourself.”

That is particularly true when the task you have set for yourself is the reshaping of an ensemble like the Philharmonic, with its long history, its entrenched traditions, and the inertia that comes of that combination. So far, Masur and his team have made greater headway than anyone imagined they could have, and they have done so with remarkable speed, something not lost on the orchestra, the critics, or the audience: With Masur’s honeymoon still on, and with a push from the anniversary hoopla, the Philharmonic is projecting ticket sales of about 96 percent this season. Still, Masur knows that he has a way to go before the Philharmonic is entirely remade in his image.

“What I want,” Mr. Masur said, “is to give people the feeling that it makes sense to go to the Philharmonic concerts because the selections are carefully made, and are made for all those people who are interested not only in hearing some music, but in learning about the spirit and imagination of the composers, and the meanings of the pieces. What we are doing now is just the beginning of what we have in mind.”

Allan Kozinn is a music critic for the New York Times. He is the author of Mischa Elman and the Romantic Style, and for many years was a contributing editor for Keynote, High Fidelity, and Opus magazines.