Children's Festival

A grown-up leaned forward at a Manhattan concert last week, tapped a little girl of 3 or so on the shoulder and asked her how she was enjoying herself. The little girl put her finger to her lips, shushed the woman and was all attention again. The concert was the first one in a Children's Festival devised and conducted by Pianist Guy Maier, his most ambitious undertaking since the disbandment of the famed Maier & Pattison two-piano team.

Pianist Maier's programs were as perfectly arranged for children as the children's Utopia sung about in the first U. S. performance of German Paul Hindemith's Let's Build a City. There was a program of musical animals (Saint-Saens' "Cuckoo," John Alden Carpenter's "Krazy Kat"), one of dances. There were picture-book slides to illustrate Debussy's Toy Chest and the country where prodigious Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived. Pianist Maier's assistants were all children, but none had prodigious talent. Little East Side children from the Music School of Henry Street Settlement piped earnestly and well about the Hindemith city where children held all the offices (the Mayor was 7) and grown-ups were of secondary importance. Bob and Ted Maier. 5 and 6-year-old sons of Pianist Maier. played six of the pieces they wrote for Song Cargo (TIME, July 20). Rolf Persinger, 11-year-old son of Teacher Louis Persinger. played the violin in a Mozart program. "My son," announced the teacher of prodigies ahead of time, "is no prodigy." Rolf, a grave, curly-haired child, would like some-time to be a concert artist like his father's pupils, Ruggiero Ricci and Yehudi Menuhin. But he plays now in a sturdy, forthright fashion more illustrative of expert teaching than of inspiration.

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