Guns, Ghosts

In Manhattan, an audience assembled to bid farewell to Igor Stravinsky, famed Russian composer, to greet Willem Mengelberg, Dutch conductor. Mengelberg, having ended his season last year with Tschaikowsky's 1812 Overture and the Nutcracker Suite, began his new season with the same pieces in the manner of a man who, interrupted, sternly repeats himself. The overture which Tschaikowsky composed to celebrate the repulse of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, scoring it for such instrumental auxiliaries as a brass band, church bells, cannon shot and the like, was rousingly rendered by the New York Philharmonic. At the climax, a brass band of eleven players rose to their feet behind the regular Philharmonic men, added their jubilant blare to the strains of the onetime (Imperial) national anthem of Russia which composes the finale. Like musketry came the applause. Stravinsky seated himself at the piano, played for the first time in Manhattan his Concerto for Piano and Wind Orchestra. "It is," he had explained beforehand to pressmen, "quite in the style of the 17th Century." With amazing virtuosity, his quick fingers manipulated cacophonies; from the tumbled wrack of sound arose the chilled phantoms of dead melodies, smelling still of death--wraiths of Handel, Liszt, Bach, Schumann--jerked on the wires of that thundergod of ghosts, Stravinsky. So far the composer has allowed no one else to play the work in public. Listeners were astounded; critics were baffled. Said Critic Olin Downes (The New York Times) : "An amazing and electrifying development." Said Critic Lawrence Gilman (The New York Herald-Tribune) : "The communings of a slightly inebriated Bach."