The 40s: The Story of a Decade (96 page)

Miss Agnes de Mille devised the show and Aaron Copland wrote the music. At the première, Miss de Mille danced the suitable-man-seeking heroine charmingly, and her associates went along enthusiastically. There was some ironing-out left for future rehearsals and performances, but the show, taken all in all, was right. Mr. Copland’s music was good theatre and, like as not, will acquire considerable circulation when a concert suite is fashioned from it. The scenery and costumes, by Oliver Smith and Kermit Love, respectively, were excellent, and the orchestral playing, under the alert direction of Franz Allers, was properly energetic.

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Last week was a Shostakovich week, with performances of three of the composer’s symphonies in four days. The Philadelphia Orchestra played the fifth, the Philharmonic-Symphony the seventh, and the Ballet Russe the first, which is the music for
Rouge et Noir.
Of course, all this didn’t furnish so unified a view of the three works as the forthcoming performances by Artur Rodzinski and the Philharmonic-Symphony will. Eugene Ormandy’s version of the fifth, with the Philadelphia, was a beautifully polished performance, Arturo Toscanini’s of the seventh was persuasively intense, and the ballet presentation of the first, under the direction of Gregory Fittelberg, was orchestrally spotty, although Mr. Fittelberg conducted the music firmly and sympathetically.

There were various points of view in the conducting and a difference in the playing of the orchestras, but there still was the Shostakovich music, and it was obvious that all three symphonies, covering sixteen years of the composer’s career, had the same musical personality behind them. All three were written by a man who is a natural at writing for orchestra; all three contain power and many ingenuities set off against winning and restrained slow movements; all three—even the seventh, composed in a Leningrad at war—have touches of humor, which, in the fifth, range from amusing kidding to heavy waggishness; and all three demonstrate unevenness in ideas and mastery in workmanship. Naturally, this isn’t any attempt to analyze Shostakovich’s music as a whole. It’s simply one reaction to three symphonies, two of which have had many performances and the third of which probably will be heard frequently. By the way, I find that the first symphony has become more impressive since its first local hearings, and the fifth less so. Of course, other listeners may feel quite the other way.

FEBRUARY 22, 1947 (ON BERNSTEIN, TOSCANINI, AND ARMSTRONG)

T
he first paragraph of music comment in the first issue of this magazine, twenty-two years ago, concerned a guest conductor—Igor Stravinsky, who was then directing the Philharmonic orchestra as a visiting maestro. Guest conductors have made first-paragraph items for me on many occasions since then, and this is another of them. The guest conductor under discussion is Leonard Bernstein, who was not quite seven years old in February, 1925. Mr. Bernstein appeared in Carnegie Hall as transient director of the Boston Symphony last week, when he conducted one of the most famous of that other guest conductor’s compositions, “Le Sacre du Printemps.” In the twenties, “Le Sacre” was still something of a chore for a good many listeners. Today, it’s an accepted and popular part of the standard orchestral repertory. It makes exacting demands on the instrumentalists and their leader (I doubt that “Le Sacre” ever will play the high-school-orchestra circuit), demands that were met brilliantly by the Boston orchestra and Mr. Bernstein. Everything was clear, logical, and cleanly rhythmic.

Before “Le Sacre,” Mr. Bernstein offered Schubert’s Seventh Symphony, sometimes known as “the symphony of heavenly length.” Actually, it is no longer than a good many other symphonies, and it probably would lose none of its heavenliness if it were shorter by a few measures. Mr. Bernstein led it with directness, crispness, and restraint. The directness and crispness were admirable, but a little less restraint would have benefited the more fanciful episodes of the charming music.

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In 1925, Berlioz’s dramatic symphony “Romeo and Juliet” was an item in the reference catalogues rather than a work for public performance, but it was subsequently brought to life, at least temporarily, by Arturo Toscanini. Recently, Mr. Toscanini revived it again, this time on two Sunday-afternoon broadcasts by the N.B.C. Symphony, a chorus, and vocal soloists. It’s a large composition and even now, more than a century since it was written, it is unconventional. In it, one hears music that is at various times exciting, eloquent, good theatre, and meandering. Mr. Toscanini’s powerful projection of the score was one of the many great
achievements of his career, and his associates responded impressively. Among the attractions of “Romeo and Juliet” is a poetic mezzo-soprano solo, sung in this case by Gladys Swarthout. Not many Berlioz vocal excerpts are apt to be heard at concerts, but this is one that deserves more general circulation, especially when it’s sung with the vocal beauty and textual expressiveness that Miss Swarthout gave it.

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There was a deal of chatter about the propriety of jazz music in concert halls twenty-two years ago. Even the mild forms of symphonic and classical jazz were considered by some people as unfit for exhibition in any auditorium where you would expect to hear Beethoven. That’s all changed now, of course, and you’re likely to encounter jazz in any concert hall, not only at regular concert hours but around midnight as well. When Louis Armstrong brought his band to Carnegie Hall a couple of Saturdays ago, and alternated his remarkable vocals with his wonderful trumpet playing, the concert was regarded as an event to be debated on its own musical merits. In fact, the most serious and furious arguments about music nowadays all seem to involve jazz. The classic eighteenth-century imbroglios between the Handel and Buononcini factions and the Gluck and Piccini enthusiasts have a parallel in the current clashes between various brands of hepcat.

PHILIP HAMBURGER

AUGUST 13, 1949 (ON TANGLEWOOD)

I
went up to Tanglewood last week, to the Berkshire Festival, to listen to the music. The music was consistently pretty wonderful, often quite exalted, but music was not, by a long shot, the only feature of the festival. I am convinced that future historians of the phenomenon of Tanglewood will devote as much attention to its non-musical as to its musical aspects. Take, for instance, cameras. Everybody seems to be carrying
a camera. The throngs that attend these concerts are music lovers, no doubt, but they are camera-happy, too. They appear desperately, almost poignantly, anxious not only to absorb the music in a flamboyantly emotional manner but to record on film every instant of their experience there. They wander up, down, and across the spacious grounds snapping pictures. They snap everything and anything. They take pictures of the gracious postcard scenery, with its rolling lawns, formal gardens, and made-to-order backdrop of lake and misty mountains. They take pictures of their families and friends. They take pictures of total strangers and they ask total strangers to take pictures of them. Mostly, though, they take pictures of Dr. Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I attended a public rehearsal of the orchestra last Saturday morning in the big music shed, and I do not see how Dr. Koussevitzky and his men got through it. An audience of some four thousand persons turned up, everybody having contributed one dollar to the orchestra’s pension fund for the privilege. Four-fifths of the audience carried cameras, or so it seemed to me, and they spent four-fifths of their time standing on their seats or ducking in and out of the aisles clicking their shutters. In the moments when they were not taking pictures, they were engaged in the second most evident non-musical aspect of the festival—hero worship. Around Tanglewood, Dr. Koussevitzky has become a legend in his lifetime. The other morning, he could not make a move on the podium, he could not lift or drop his baton, he could not signal to an oboe player or whistle at a flutist without evoking a chorus of “Oh”s and “Ah”s from the audience. Every ordinary, workmanlike gesture was greeted with adulation and open-eyed surprise. I must confess that I found this slightly frightening, and I would wager that Dr. Koussevitzky—who has every right to expect any honor—is a bit disturbed, too. The tangent down which these audiences now seem to be racing is leading in a distinctly non-musical direction. One can well imagine their ohing and ahing with equal fervor at a crooner or some Hollywood celebrity.