Music

It was a lucky star which led some days ago to the scheduling by Signor Giulio Gatti-Casazza of a “Don Giovanni” at the Metropolitan on a Wednesday evening, and by one Serge Koussevitzky of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” at the beginning of a Boston Symphony program in Carnegie Hall the very next night. Thus was a most fortunate sort of continuity effected, right in the midst of a harum-scarum, inordinately confused season.

And what could be more pleasant than to report that both the opera and the “serenade for string orchestra” were accorded eloquent interpretations? Even though Ezio Pinza, who sang the title role at the Metropolitan, was cold-ridden, and the shimmering delicacy and wit and finesse of the “Nachtmusik” was followed by a woeful inanity called “Introduction and Hymn” by Igor Markevitch, these placid, lovely Mozartistic works stand out in retrospect.

Incidentally, one of the minor comforts of the music week was the opportunity to hear Pinza with and without a cold. In the latter capacity the basso sang a mellow, rich Fiesco in the belatedly-revived simon Boccanegra.”

An important recent event was the opening of a three-concert Beethoven piano and violin sonata cycle by Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Albert Spalding at Town Hall. This was obviously a labor of love for the pair, and it seemed as they played the three sonatas they had picked to begin with that they were playing in the intimacy of their own hearthsides. For this they are to be it goes without saying, congratulated. Rarely has the Adagio espressivo of the G major sonata (Op. 96) been so affectionately treated.

Hans Lange yielded the Philharmonic-Symphony’s podium to Arturo Toscanini last week, but not before he had turned in a skillful reading of Sibelius’s colorful First Symphony, and given Poldi Mildner another opportunity to exhibit her technical excellence, this time with Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto.

Last Tuesday afternoon Leon Barzin and his National Orchestral Association flashed a couple of spotlights on five Hungarians–Joseph Szigeti, the violinist, and the Roth Quartet (Feri Roth, Jeno Antal, Ferenc Molnar and Janos Scholz), the former playing with dazzling brilliance the Beethoven D major Concerto (Op. 61), the latter helping in a first performance of Conrad Beck’s relatively uninventive Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, in which the composer points out again a paradoxical truth: that breakers-with-tradition may be bound by a tradition of their own making.

MCDONALD ON RADIO

High Commissioner James G. McDonald of the German Refugee Body, will discuss the subject “Christian Responsibility Toward German – Refugees” in a radio address to be broadcast Sunday over a coast-to-coast network of the N.B.C.

The address will describe the plight of the German refugees and the measures being planned for their relief. Recently the High Commissioner returned from the Lausanne conference of the Refugee Body where he presided and made a study of the situation.