Concert Business

Because Fritz Kreisler packed up his fiddle and his ailing wife and sailed for Europe one night last week, a group of know-it-alls in New York started one of Depression's dreariest stories. They said the concert business was dead. Even an artist like Kreisler was unable to get engagements. He was returning to Europe with his purse limp and his pride hurt.

Truth was that Mrs. Kreisler wanted to spend Christmas in their Berlin home, that Kreisler wanted to see about the London production of his operetta Sissy before he finished his U. S. tour. What made the know-it-alls' talk all the more absurd was a statement by several New York concert managers to the effect that their business is now on a sounder basis than it has been for two years.

Concerts might be shoes or silver polish for the systematic, hardheaded way they are merchandised in the U. S. New York managers are the wholesalers, local managers the retailers. Sound business means two things: the New York manager has been able to sell a substantial number of dates; and the local managers have been able to sell a sufficient number of seats to make them want to buy again. Artists' fees are lower this year with a few exceptions. So are seats. Bookings are bigger than the New York managers expected. Lily Pons had to turn down 40 dates. Lawrence Tibbett has 51; Kreisler and Rachmaninoff, 33 each; Yehudi Menuhin, 28 (all his parents will let him play); Heifetz, 26, Zimbalist, Harold Bauer and Gabrilowitsch, expert musicians whose box-office power has never been sensational, have in the neighborhood of 30. Nathan Milstein has 33; Nelson Eddy, 37; Rose Bampton, 40. Cancellations were last year's bugaboo. A local manager would engage an artist and then be unable to sell enough seats to meet the fee. So far this season there have been practically no cancellations.

Record tours in the concert business are the ones made by the most successful newcomers of the season before. True to form, the Singing Boys of Vienna have 90 dates this year; Shankar, the Hindu dancer, 85 (TIME, Oct. 30). Record crowds have gone to hear Lawrence Tibbett who fortnight ago was photographed for the first time with his new son*. Tibbett has been kept singing encores for an hour after his concerts were supposedly over. Stage-struck girls have blocked his dressing-room clamouring for autographs. In Seattle and Washington, D. C. he drew the biggest audiences those cities have ever known for a musical event.

Tibbett's success is reminiscent of the boom years, which for concerts ended not with the stock crash but with radio and sound movies which came in at a time when the market was already imperilled by too many second-rate artists. In the boom years Galli-Curci and John McCormack were the big money-making concert singers. They would get 100 engagements a season and they needed no advertising. Phonograph records built up their names, besides earning them royalties which year after year ran over $100,000. Deflation has weeded out second-raters and for the top-notchers the halls are filling up again.

San Francisco's Line-Up

A bushy-haired Russian conductor tensely beating time, an elfin little Spaniard playing the piano and a lot of white-gloved ladies proudly patting their hands together marked the opening of the San Francisco Symphony last week. The conductor was Issai Dobrowen who rang in a flashy performance of a Tschaikowsky symphony. The pianist was Jose Iturbi who would have dearly loved to conduct the orchestra himself. The ladies were proud because many of them had worked hard to raise the guarantee necessary to save the Symphony for San Francisco. But with all their efforts the orchestra remained last week a rickety, anemic organization compared with its lusty young brother, the San Francisco Opera Company.

The San Francisco Symphony used to have a 24-week season under solid old Alfred Hertz. Now it plays for ten weeks and many of its best musicians have taken safer jobs with other orchestras. The San Francisco Opera Company has been held up since Depression as a model to every opera-giving city in the U. S. It has had world-famed singers, this year Lucrezia, Bori, Claudia Muzio, Giovanni Martinelli, Ezio Pinza, Gertrude Kappel, Cyrena Van Gordon, Lawrence Tibbett. It has its own ballet, expertly trained by Adolph Bolm. It has usually managed to pay its way although this year, to no one's great concern, it ran up a deficit of $30,000. The Symphony hopes to square itself by having Arturo Toscanini for its guest conductor in the spring. Toscanini has always wanted to go to California but the New York Philharmonic, none too happy itself since Clarence Mackay's fortune shrank, was unwilling to spare its one big drawing card during the winter season.

*Tibbett had twin sons by his first wife, Grace Mackay Smith, who worked in a Los Angeles realtor's office so that Tibbett could go East to study. When rich & famed, Tibbett got a divorce. His present wife, Jennie, had three sons by her first husband, John Clark Burgard, San Francisco broker and sportsman.

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