Hungarian Rhapsody

Most swing enthusiasts are bored by highbrow music; most concertgoers are irritated by swing. But the world's No. 1 highbrow fiddler, Joseph Szigeti,* and the world's No. 1 swing clarinetist, Benny Goodman, have long admired each other. When Hungarian-born Szigeti heard Goodman last year, he was so impressed that he wrote home to his friend, Composer Bela Bartok, asking him to compose something that he and Goodman could play together. Absent-minded Bartok didn't even bother to answer, but surprised Szigeti a few months later by sending him the manuscript of a brand-new Rhapsody for Clarinet and Violin.

Last week, at his annual Manhattan recital in Carnegie Hall, Fiddler Szigeti, with bespectacled Clarinetist Goodman as assisting artist, gave the new Rhapsody its first public airing. To play it Szigeti needed two different violins, Goodman two clarinets. To articulate Composer Bartok's complicated rhythms both Fiddler Szigeti and Swingster Goodman needed all the gumption they could muster. Because the rhythms were as Hungarian as goulash, perspiring Middle-Westerner Goodman never quite got into the groove. But Hungarian Szigeti went to town, rode his pony so excitedly he broke his E string.

Their mixed audience of high and low brows heard the performance with mixed emotions, frowned at Bartok's obscure modernisms, guffawed at Goodman's cackling clarinet, but applauded like fans at a cockfight. Soberer pundits grumbled that Bartok's score was a tricky jumble of Stravinskian boisterousness, sniffed that they preferred Szigeti's superb performances of Beethoven's A Minor Sonata and Bach's unaccompanied Chaconne.

* Of today's fine fiddlers the are brillinat Jascha Heifetz, mellow Fritz Kreisler, fastidious Joseph Szigeti.Connoisseurs, who judge by form rather than knockouts, have long rated Szigeti tops.

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