Symphonies

Five U. S. orchestras played almost simultaneously last week their first concerts of the season.

In Chicago, 25 years have passed since Frederick Stock, violinist, succeeded the late Theodore Thomas as conductor.

Last week's program--Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel, Wagner--was the first of some 80 for grownups. The children's series will be expanded this year, will be given in cooeperation with a four-year course in appreciation in Chicago public high schools. In Cleveland, Nikolai Sokolov's orchestra began its twelfth season, presumably the last before it moves into the new hall provided by the $6,000,000 endowment fund raised last spring (TIME, May 6). Feature of the opening concert was the premiere of Werner Janssen's New Year's Eve in New York, scored for full orchestra and jazz band. Attentive listeners to its ingenious noise were Manager Adella Prentiss Hughes, Mrs. Nikolai Sokolov, Composer Janssen, his mother and sister, all together in a box. In Cincinnati the symphony founded 35 years ago by Mrs. William Howard Taft began its first season under the auspices of the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts. Now assisting in its support will be a new fund--$2,000,000 contributed by the general public, $2,000,000 and more (reckoning real estate and works of art) by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Phelps Taft. Again Fritz Reiner is conductor. The Minneapolis Symphony, under Conductor Henri Verbrugghen, favored first this year the twin-citizens of St. Paul, played its second concert at home. Again the orchestra will take a midwinter tour as far as Havana, and a spring tour, adding to its present total of 2,191 concerts. In Manhattan, a new orchestra called the Manhattan Symphony gave the first of a series of 30 popular-priced concerts. Dr. Henry Hadley, rarely inspiring as conductor or composer, waved the baton. Ruggiero Ricci, nine-year-old violinist from San Francisco, astounded listeners with a marvelous playing of the Mendelssohn concerto. Like young Yehudi Menuhin, this new prodigy is a pupil of Louis Persinger.