Debussy Embrace

The Symphony season began in Boston last week with Boston's best in attendance and Serge Koussevitzky conducting. Lest those factors-alone should breed complacency, the management complained in its program book of an estimated deficit of $134,000, blamed increased salaries, begged aid. Had the concert been dull more would have spent the time mulling over the appeal, considering their own budgets. But Conductor Koussevitzky kept them preoccupied.

Critic Philip Hale of the Boston Herald found the first concert satisfying, wrote: "If Debussy could have heard his 'Festivals' he would have gone on the platform and, in the face of the public, embraced Mr. Koussevitzky."

Prodigal

There was no fatted calf, no purple robe, no new ring for his finger when Leopold Stokowski stepped up on the dais last week for the season's first Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Academy of Music. But there was the same blond halo and the wildest acclaim Philadelphians permit themselves. Their prodigal was home and great was the rejoicing. He had had them worried.. All manner of mystic rumors had drifted in from his Far East trip. He would return. He would not return. He had been hypnotized by Indian and Javanese music. At best he could never come back the same.

Whatever else may come, Conductor Stokowski stepped up on the dais last for the time being. He gave them the same big music that he himself has taught them to demand--a Bach choral prelude orchestrated-- by himself, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Sibelius' "Finlandia." He gave them a novelty--Roussel's Concerto, pleasant and unimportant. Philadelphians held their thumbs and waited. Stokowski is to be with them until late November, back again in late March. Able guest conductors are to be sandwiched in between-- Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Bernardino Molinari, Sir Thomas Beecham, Clemens Krauss from Frankfurt (in his U. S. debut). For most Philadelphians, however, only Stokowski can make big music, big surprises.

"C" for Symbol

It was a happy choice of Conductor Willem Mengelberg's. Beethoven's Overture to Coriolanus opens on a unison C: C stands for Combine. What more appropriate, then, than that the mighty C of the Overture should commence the first program of the combined New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society? By accident or design, Conductor Mengelberg drew a pretty symbol from symphony music, that veritable library of symbols. Some 24 musicians new to the Philharmonic have been placed under Mengelberg's guiding hand as a result of the merger last spring of the New York Philharmonic and the New York Symphony-- (TIME, April 2). These two dozen transfers have enlivened the old Philharmonic, helped to give it warmth through Mozart's "Divertimento in D Major"; teased the old Philharmonic through Richard Strauss's Till Eulens pie gel's Merry Pranks; listened respectfully while the old Philharmonic read the tonal poetry of Schubert's Symphony in C Major.

Philharmonic faces predominate on the new board as they do in the band. Type faces on the new board: Harry Harkness Flagler, onetime patron of the Symphony, is president of the new Board of Directors; Walter Damrosch, onetime Symphony batonist, is "guest conductor" under the combine regime. Of the Philharmonic group there are Clarence Hungerford Mackay, who is chairman of the Directors; Mengelberg and Arturo Toscanini, conductors; Sir Thomas Beecham, guest conductor, and Ernest Schelling, conductor of the children's concerts.

Manhattan thinks well of Willem Mengelberg. In Holland, where he is conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, he is a great man, travels on a diplomatic passport, is the pet ambassador of goodwill. With the Philharmonic he has established himself as a careful, conscientious leader with a fine flair for effects and fire enough to achieve them. His Wagner is weak as are most of his operatic undertakings but his classics, especially the German, are excellent, his Strauss supreme. He ranks high with the world's great conductors; not so high, however, as to be included in the lobby debates as to who will be the big man this year-- Stokowski or Toscanini?

Pacific Opera

Opera stars with all their trappings went last week from San Francisco to Los Angeles, set up shop there for a ten-day season. Tosca was the first opera with tall, blonde Maria Jeritza (Austrian Baroness von Popper) as the heckled heroine. Of a similar performance given a week earlier in San Francisco, Critic Pitts Sanborn of the New York Telegram wrote:

"The finale of Act I was a hopeless bungle, due to an awkward set that forced the ecclesiastical procession into the body of the church, an amateur chorus, a green Scarpia (Lawrence Tibbett), the lack of an organ and the sluggish conducting of Merola. . . . Any unforeseen gap she [Jeritza] would fill with her bloodcurdling shrieks or her hollow whispers; she raved, raced and ranted all over the scene, she trembled like a palsied aspen leaf; betimes she played the accomplished acrobat, and, of course, she sang most of the 'Viss d'Arte' lying face downward, as if praying to Proserpine through a crack in the floor.

"Incidentally she wore greenish blue in the first act and white and vermilion in the second."

California takes its opera in concentrated doses, in early autumn, the San Francisco Opera Association first, then the Los Angeles Opera Association. The producing companies and the repertoires are essentially the same with Gaetano Merola director of both, and many of the same singers. Some 5,000 heard Aida in San Francisco's Dreamland Auditorium. Then came La Cena delle Beffe, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Turandot, L'Amore del Tre Re, Fedora, Andrea Chenier, Faust, Carmen, Cavalleri Rusticana and Pagliacci. Los Angeles has the same list without Aida and Fedora. There were many members of the Metropolitan Opera in the casts, such famed ones as Elisabeth Rethberg, Edward Johnson, Ezio Pinza, Tibbett, Jeritza, and the Pavley-Oukrainsky Ballet.

Notes

In Philadelphia last week the Curtis Institute of Music* broke all precedent and began its fifth season on a purely scholarship basis. No tuition fees were accepted, musical merit was sole entrance requirement. Again is Pianist Josef Casimir Hofman director.

Ganna Walska, recovered from trunk troubles suffered at the hands of Manhattan customs officers (TIME, Oct. 8), permitted it to be announced last week that she would sing in Tosca in Washington Nov. 7 as guest artist with the American Music Drama. Walska performances have been promised before, to Chicago and Manhattan, but hitherto something has always intervened./- Walska herself claims acute stagefright.

Cincinnati last week dedicated the two new wings of its Music Hall, made it the occasion for a Greater Cincinnati Industrial Exposition. A thousand school children attended one afternoon, sang praises before a new marble bust of Stephen Foster, onetime Cincinnatian, composer of "Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground," "Old Folks at Home," Old Kentucky Home" and "Old Black Joe."

*There are 124 musicians in the regular playing personnel: 123 men, one woman. Harpist Steffy Goldner.

*Endowed with $12,500,000 by Mary Louise Curtis Bok, wife of Publisher Edward William Bok, in memory of her mother, the late Mrs. Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis.

/-Her only operatic appearances in the U. S. were in Detroit, Albany and New London where she sang incognito with the Wagnerian Opera Company (financed by her and now extinct) in late 1923.