After the iconic opening of Don Juan there is a soft flowing section in F# major. The concertmaster has this solo.
Eliot Chapo hesitated in the fifth bar. It was an expressive nuance really but he ended up a half note late. Eliot was a great violinist and he played with elegance and polish but Leinsdorf did not make a rhythmic adjustment so unfortunately, half the orchestra followed him while the other half followed Leinsdorf.
Musicians refer to this as a “train wreck” and it wasn’t immediately audible because the harmony was static. Then we came to a series of chromatically ascending chords. Because the musicians were playing a half bar from each other, a ghastly series of ascending chord cluster resulted before we arrived at the second theme. Then everything was back on track. At the work’s conclusion, bassist Lew Norton made a pronouncement to anybody who would listen. He orated from his place in the section, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the New York Philharmonic pulls it off once again. A minor blemish, really, but in these expert hands- utterly imperceptible!” Mr. Norton was born in Chattanooga, TN and though he sometimes referred to himself jokingly as a “redneck” he was anything but. He was a brilliant guy, a super versatile musician and a marvellous bass player. He performed the fearsomely difficult Mozart “Per Questa Bella Mano” bass obbligato with Jens Nygaard and he
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