Cincinnati's Festival

As in Baseball the World Series is followed by city series and barnstorming exhibitions, so in Music is there a season for the concentrated programs called festivals. Europe crowds hers into the summer months when tourists are passing her way. The U. S. has hers in the spring, after important artists finish their opera and concert engagements, before the citizenry starts vacationing. Festivals have been given already this spring in Washington, D. C., Emporia, Kans., Harrisburg, Pa., Manhattan's Greenwich Village, Hamilton, Ontario, and Halifax. May festivals are scheduled for Bethlehem, Pa., Ann Arbor, Evanston, Rochester, N. Y., Keene, N. H., White Plains, N. Y. This spring, looming above these is the 29th biennial Festival given last week in Cincinnati.

Cincinnati's Festival is of outstanding importance for several reasons: It is one of the oldest of U. S. festivals, started in 1873 by Conductor Theodore Thomas. It is a colossal affair, involving many amateur singers (610 grownups this year, 703 school children), besides the Cincinnati Symphony and imported soloists. The programs are meticulously prepared and the performances attended by social pomp corresponding to that which Manhattan and Chicago bestow on their opera. Cincinnati newspapers devote columns to describing the costumes of local dowagers and debutantes.

Last week's Festival in no way let down Cincinnati's high traditions. The programs were for the most part ambitious and substantial. Brahms's great German Requiem came first in honor of the late Frank van der Stucken who for many years directed the Festival. Of the soloists, two from England made promising U. S. debuts--Tenor Walter Widdop and Contralto Muriel Brunkskill. Lily Pons, the Metropolitan's new French find, walked away with a program on which she sang three florid coloratura airs. But the hero for the duration of the five day Festival was Conductor Eugene Goossens. Conductor Goossens, for seven years leader of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, was directing his first Cincinnati Festival, succeeding Chicago's Frederick Stock who no longer has the strength for a double job.

For Conductor Goossens the Festival was an important milestone, one which few conductors could put behind them at 38. Goossens is a Britisher, son of a conductor and an opera singer, brother of an oboist and two harpists. At ten he left England to study in Bruges, learned to play the piano well, the violin better. Then he returned to England, began playing in Sir Henry Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra which, when he was 18, played several of his compositions, himself conducting.

Goossens' first job as a conductor was under Sir Thomas Beecham (opera, pills) after which he led the Diaghilev ballet for five years. In 1923 he went to Rochester where he was helped by his strong, handsome appearance. In Rochester last year he found a second wife for himself, pretty, 21-year-old Janet ("Jansy") Lewis, a student at the Eastman School of Music. (His engagement to his good friend, Mrs. Christian Holmes of Fleischmann's Yeast wealth, had previously been rumored and denied.) Goossens' hobbies are Shakespeare and shark fishing. His best known composition: the opera Judith done to the libretto of the late Arnold Bennett (TIME, July 8, 1929). Goossens' appearance in Cincinnati last week was just an introduction. Next autumn he will be the Cincinnati Symphony's regular conductor, succeeding Hungarian Fritz Reiner.

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