Season's Overtures

Almost in unison last week the country's first four symphony orchestras sounded the overture to a new music season. Limousines lined up for blocks before the concert halls in Boston. New York. Philadelphia, Chicago. Dowagers and their escorts pushed their way impatiently through the sidewalk crowds. Music students, shabby and excited, ran up the steps to their top-gallery seats. Out of the wings like ball-players leaving their dugouts came the big league orchestra players. Oboes sounded A. A buzz of tuning and the big-league captains appeared--Chicago's square old Frederick Stock; Boston's Serge Koussevitzky, aloof and immaculate; Philadelphia's Leopold Stokowski, blond-mopped and mercury-quick as he shot on to the stage; New York's big Bruno Walter who conducts the Philharmonic until Arturo Toscanini returns in January.

The shadow of Adolf Hitler looming over Conductor Bruno Walter aroused the week's big demonstration. Bruno Walter (real name: Schlesinger) was first of the Jewish musicians to lose his job last spring in Germany. A conductor without an orchestra, he has drifted around since then, giving guest performances in Holland, Austria, London. Impressed with his martyrdom Philharmonic subscribers, who usually save their hero-worship for Toscanini. stood up when the big. kindly German came on stage, clapped him louder and longer than they ever clap his sensitive, scholarly performances. Beethoven and Brahms--Walter's program last week --were painstakingly conservative. The other big-league conductors played almost as safe. Koussevitzky added Scriahin and a touch of his favorite Debussy. Stokowski chose Bach. Wagner and Schubert. Stock finished off with a mild dash of Stravinsky.

Economy was the subject in New York where the orchestra's predicament was unpleasantly emphasized by the absence of Critic Lawrence Oilman's authoritative program notes. Economy was the keynote of the Philadelphia concert where Stokowski. almost in a single breath, mourned the passing of the Orchestra's president, Alexander Van Rensselaer, and pleaded for support so that the orchestra might go on. This week at a banquet promoted by William Curtis Bok, the Philadelphia Orchestra's unsold season tickets were auctioned in an attempt to save the players a pay-cut of 19%. With its orchestra at stake Philadelphia is overlooking the excursions of ils fair-haired conductor who has just been in

Hollywood where he studied sound-reproduction, contracted to write the music for Break of Hearts, a John Barrymore-Katharine Hepburn picture.

With a few-unimportant exceptions the big-league orchestras have kept their old lineups and star performers. Squat little Mischa Mischakoff still plays first violin for Chicago, lean young Alfred Wallenstein the 'cello for Manhattan, with Bruno Jaenicke behind him blowing himself red in the face over his French horn. Boston still has Richard Burgin playing first violin. Jean Bedetti first 'cello. In Philadelphia sleek Anton Torello still wields the big bull fiddle; Oscar Schwar, who was a drummer-boy in the Imperial German Army, still presides over the tympani.

Chicago is beginning its season a week early to catch more World's Fair visitors. To the Fair late this month will go the Boston Symphony, taking in its homeward stride Ann Arbor. Dayton, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Schenectady. Three times this winter Boston's orchestra will play in Baltimore and Washington, cities which the New York Philharmonic no longer feels financially able to visit. But before he sets out on tour Conductor Koussevitzky has a private mission to fulfill. Just as Richard Wagner wrote the Siegfried Idyll to serenade his Cosima one birthday morning, so each year on Oct. 14. Mme Koussevitzky's birthday, the Boston conductor gets a group of symphony men to come and play her an early-morning concert.

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