Symphonic Novelties

Several of the nation's major symphony orchestras last week filled the air with novel sounds.

The New York Philharmonic-Symphony, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, played the first performance of Roy Harris' Symphonic Epigram. Composer Harris wrote his six minutes of music to commemorate the orchestra's 25th season of CBS broadcasts, used the letters CBS as his motive (he jimmied the letter S into the scale by using its phonetic spelling, Es, which, in German, also means the note E flat). The music was brassy, somber and overwritten, and seemed to be just getting under way when it stopped.

The Boston Symphony, conducted by Charles Munch, made its Manhattan debut this season with Mario Peragallo's Violin Concerto. The work, by Italy's rising Composer Peragallo (44), won a first prize in Rome's Twentieth-Century Music conference last spring. A slick combination of atonal technique and Puccini-like melody, it kept Violinist Joseph Fuch's fingers flying, pleased musical conservatives more than the radicals.

The Chicago Symphony, under Fritz Reiner, gave the U.S. premiere of Rolf Liebermann's Concerto for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra. The Sauter-Finegan Band--sporting bright red jackets amid the longhairs' white ties and tails--played tricky syncopations and harsh tones that showed Swiss Composer Liebermann to be a close follower of Stan Kenton's jazz-style arrangements. The symphonic parts of the work were less exciting, but everybody, from the musicians onstage to the last hipster in the auditorium, had a fine time. Conductor Reiner, who started off his career as a percussionist, was so pleased that he took time off during a rehearsal for an impromptu jam session (see cut). Chicago News Critic Irving Sablosky welcomed the concert as a "meeting place ... for twelve-tone music and its more popular cousin, 'progressive jazz' . . . This wasn't the end, man, but it was an interesting beginning."

Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Howard Mitchell, fresh from such publicity stunts as tiny tots' concerts and a half-time concert at a Washington Redskins' football game, gave what it billed as a "Soundorama Hi-Fi Concert." Designed both to introduce hi-fi bugs to live music and to show a symphony audience how good hi-fi can be, the program was weighted with colorful scores, e.g., Salome's Dance, Rimsky-Korsakov's Spanish Caprice, etc. Part of the performance was recorded and played back over a system of 30 speakers, and some listeners could hardly tell the difference between real and electronic.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Alfred Wallenstein, also tried some electronic tricks. Its featured soloist was a black box--an Ampex tape recorder. The work, called Poem of Cycles and Bells, was composed by Manhattan Tape-sichordists Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening (TIME, Nov. 10, 1952). Described as "music trapped from beyond the range of the human ear," the solo part consisted of ordinary flute, piano and vocal sounds, recorded and then sometimes distorted beyond recognition by various mechanical and electronic means. The composition got notice as far away as Baltimore, where the Sun protested: "Down with Space Music . . . Give us a penny whistle." Sandwiched between Stravinsky's Firebird and Paul Creston's Symphony No. 3, the work actually was surprisingly gentle on the ears; by comparison, the unidentifiable flutings and reverberations from the machine sounded only slightly outlandish.

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