Open-Air Music

Great arc lights flooded the City College Stadium in New York last week. Some 12.000 people clambered up the bleachers. Dozens more dotted the roofs of the dingy apartment houses nearby--to look down into the football arena which had been converted into summer concert grounds for the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra. Conductor Willem van Hoogstraten, looking like a college boy in his white flannel pants, made the opening concert a memorial to Brahms and Wagner.* He flicked his baton in militant, routine fashion but most of the orchestramen needed no leading. They could have played the familiar music with their eyes shut. And the 12,000 listeners, few of whom think of paying winter concert prices, were completely satisfied. Stadium concerts had started in the traditional way--even to the lengthy, almost inaudible speech of stooped, old Adolph Lewisohn who built the Stadium, makes up the deficits, officiates each year at the opening before he leaves for his Saranac camp where he intones German and Jewish folksongs to his guests for hours on end. Sultry summer evenings bring excellent open-air music to a dozen U. S. cities, whereby musicians are kept busy from one formal winter season to the next. In San Mateo, smart suburb of San Francisco, Conductor Richard Lert (Playwright Vicki Baum's husband) began concerts in the picturesque Woodland Theatre last week. In Cincinnati's Zoo where Goliath, Barnum & Bailey's 10.000-lb. sea lion recently visited, Lohengrin started eight weeks of opera on money largely raised by Mrs. John Josiah Emery, Artist Charles Dana Gibson's daughter. Only disturbance the opening week was made by a peahen named Madame Blanche who emitted a shrill Nya-a-a-a each time Soprano Hizi Koyke as Madame Butterfly struck a high note. In New York's Central Park rollerskaters kept time to Goldman band music. The "pop" concerts started in the White Plains West Chester County Centre in which maples and evergreen trees have been propped up. In Westport, Conn., the Manhattan Symphony postponed until next week the world premiere of Secretary William H. Woodin's The Gallant Tin Soldier, gave instead Daniel Gregory Mason's Chanticleer. Nearby in Weston, Conductor Nikolai Sokoloffs backyard was rolled and ready for the new New York Orchestra which he will take touring next season (TIME, June 19). St. Louis concentrates on light opera during the summer and usually makes it pay. In Forest Park, St. Louis has the biggest revolving stage in the U. S., built between majestic twin oaks which are heavily insured and dosed with castor oil to fend off sickness. There the Municipal ("Muny") Opera Company broke all attendance records lately with Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet (62,000 heard it in a week). Floradora, musty relic of the nineties, ran close second. Last week at the Muny Opera Rip Van Winkle was put on with Robert Planquette's corny, old-time score jazzed almost beyond recognition. The Muny Rip was a radio entertainer who took too much bootleg gin and dreamed he was the sleepy Washington Irving hero. He sang one piece called ''My Hudson River Home" which was strangely like "Ol' Man River," Red Coats traveled through the papier-mache Catskills in a rattly old Ford, spent their evenings listening to a portable radio. Audiences seemed to relish the crass 1933 interpolations but the scene which went biggest was the one left just as it was when Joseph Jefferson, greatest of all Rips, played it in 1859, the scene when bearded old Rip wakes up after his 20 years' nap, finds that everyone has forgotten him and a picture of George Washington taking King George's place in Nick Yedder's tavern.

* Fourth of July Conductor van Hoogstraten played the blustering Grand Festival March which Richard Wagner wrote for the Centennial Celebration of the Declaration of Independence. Ever a shrewd business man, Wagner demanded $5.000 for his March and when it was finished he sent it, not to Conductor Theodore Thomas who had commissioned it for the Philadelphia celebration, but to a German bank, there to be held until the $5,000 was deposited. The few tender passages Wagner interpreted as being "the beautiful and accomplished women of America joining in the festival procession." The flyleaf of the score bears the note "Dedicated to the Women's Centennial Committee by Richard Wagner."

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