Stravinsky on Tour

The Boston Symphony came last week to Manhattan--with Serge Koussevitzky for conductor, Contralto Margarete Matzenauer, Tenor Tudor Davies, Baritone Fraser Gange for soloists, the Harvard Glee Club for a Chorus, and Speaker Paul Leyssac. This combination gave, as it did a fortnight ago in Boston (TIME, Mar. 5), the OEdipus Rex of Igor Stravinsky. Even the ablest critics sometimes disagree. Said Samuel Chotzinov (the World): ". . . a desperate attempt at a musical interpretation of lofty cosmic tragedy . . . a presumptuous drive with nothing of any consequence to back it up."

Pitts Sanborn (the Telegram): "Whatever one's opinion, it was clearly nothing to be neglected."

Olin Downes (the Times): ". . . very empty, tedious and ineffective."

Lawrence Gilman (the Tribune): "Despite the unreconciled and heterogeneous qualities of this score, its lack of any prevailing integrity of style, the music has a power and an eloquence--sombre, granitic, yes 'monumental'--that sweep aside one's reservations and make one helpless before its tyrannous and cumulative onslaught."