In a regrettable attempt to apply the scientific method to music, which resulted merely in the wedding of pseudo-science to quasi-music, Paul Whiteman and an augmented orchestra performed the other night in the Metropolitan Opera laboratory what he chose to call his “Sixth Experiment in Modern American Music.”
This mesalliance was characterized by such unsavory phenomena as the merger of a “Kiss Me Again” chorus in brass with a full-orchestra rendition of Delibe’s delightful “Naila” waltz, and the re-orchestration of W. C. Handy’s worthy “St. Louis Blues” in a manner which is a cross between that of the “Pathetique” Symphony and the school of the late John Philip Sousa.
A listless performance was given Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”; a sympathetic reading was given the “arty”, typically pretentious “Valses for Piano and Orchestra” of Dana Suesse, with Miss Suesse at the piano, and only William Grant Still’s “A Deserted Plantation” stood out as a successful “experimental” item, although Still has done better things
It is infinitely more pleasant to write about last Monday’s concert of the Beethoven Association in Town Hall, where Efrem Zimbalist, violinist, Harold Bauer, pianist, Bruno Jaenicke, horn virtuoso, and Teh Aguilars, resuscitators of the lute, hold forth with great felicity for the benefit not only of the Association but of a very large audience as well.
Unforgettable were the Adagio Mesto in Brahm’s E flat piano-horn-violin Trio (Op. 40), a majestic, magnificently executed piece; much of the Beethoven C minor violin-piano Sonata (Op. 30, No. 2), and the Aguilar quartet’s playing of the deFalla Fire Dance from “L’Amor Brujo.”
The New English Singers, in the second of their three-concert cycle at Town Hall, contributed to a week’s pleasure with, among countless other mercies, their customarily erudite singing of the Warlock “Corpus Christi” and the Vaughan Williams “Wassail.”
Beatrice Belkin, coloratura soprano formerly with the Metropolitan Opera, spent her last two weeks regaling the incredibly large number of persons who forced their way into Roxy’s Radio City Music Hall with a charming, musicianly reading of the vocal score which Maurice Baron extracted from Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Scheherazade.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
