Open-Air Music (Cont'd)

Last week brought the opening of Philadelphia Orchestra's fourth outdoor season before the biggest crowd since its 1930 premiere in the natural auditorium in a nook of Fairmount Park called Robin Hood Dell. The crowd acclaimed Conductor Alexander Smallens, stood up politely while his men played "The Star Spangled Banner," then sat down to listen, with mounting enthusiasm, to the Overture to The Flying Dutchman, Prelude a I'Apres- Midi d'un Faune, Richard Strauss's Don Juan and Brahms's C Minor Symphony.

Five nights later the Dell was again filled, this time for larger, more exciting entertainment--Philadelphia's first outdoor grand opera. As in most U. S. cities, even indoor opera has led a precarious existence in Philadelphia. Conductor Smallens himself once called it a "bataille des dames" (battle of ladies). That was just after his own Philadelphia Civic Opera Company, headed by Mrs. Henry M. Tracy, was disbanded, eclipsed by Mrs. Edward Bok's Philadelphia Grand Opera, which temporarily ceased functioning last autumn (TIME, Oct. 10). The fact that costumes, scenery and lighting apparatus from the Grand Opera Company were available for outdoor opera this summer was what helped make Conductor Smallens new venture in the Dell possible.

First of the summer operas was Aida with Anne Roselle and Frederick Jagel of Manhattan's Metropolitan, Giuseppe Martino-Rossi and about 150 other voices on the Dell's 60 ft. stage. Footlights, border lights, electric towers, side spotlights and a "traveling moon" made the shell look to some listeners like an opera-lover's Fourth of July. Philadelphians looked forward to seven more operatic productions including Traviata, Faust, and Rigoletto. Next year. Conductor Smallens promised to have stage facilities adequate for Wagner.

The outdoor music season which was launched last fortnight (TIME, July 10), was by last week in full blast from coast to coast. The Hollywood Bowl concerts, run by a new group of sponsors called the Symphonies Under the Stars Foundation, were definitely scheduled to open with reduced admission prices and a new series of twilight concerts on Sundays. Bickering about musicians' pay had finally been settled and Los Angeles felt pleased with the prospect of 32 summer concerts.

In San Francisco, the Summer Symphony was ready to open its eighth summer season with eight weekly concerts, the first under Conductor Henry Hadley and others under guest conductors including Richard Lert, Alfred Hertz, Fritz Reiner, Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Another development near San Francisco was the organization, just across the Golden Gate from the city, of the Marin County Musical Chest, financed by subscriptions averaging 25-c- from members of Marin County's mixed population of esthetes and Portuguese dairy farmers.

In Weston, Conn., Nicolai Sokoloff achieved his ambition last week to lead his own New York Orchestra in an "amphitheatre" constructed by rolling and mowing a hillside field on his farm.

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