IGOR STRAVINSKY is
announced as having been appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry
at Harvard University, for the 1939-1940 academic year. Though designated as a
chair of poetry, this Professorship is awarded annually, without regard to
nationality, to men of high distinction and preferably of international reputation
in poetry, music, or any other of the fine arts. It is believed to be the first
time a musician and composer has been chosen for this post. Stravinsky will
live in Cambridge and give at least six public lectures.
MORE THAN SEVENTY-TWO
THOUSAND DOLLARS were the gross receipts of the Metropolitan Opera Company
during its recent three day season in Dallas, Texas.
THE HANDEL AND HAYDN
SOCIETY of Boston, America’s oldest singing organization of real oratorio
proportions, closed its one hundred and twenty-fourth season with I a
performance of ”The Damnation of Faust” by Berlioz, on the evening of April
16th, in Symphony Hall, with Dr. Thompson Stone conducting. Gertrude Ehrhart,
Boston soprano, was the Marguerite; Paul Althouse, Metropolitan Opera
tenor, sang as Faust; Gean Greenwell, basso, was the Mephistopheles;
and Mark Love, Chicago City Opera Company baritone, the Brander. The
organization gave its first performance, Haydn’s “Creation,” in the Stone
Chapel, on Christmas night, 1815, with Gottlieb Graupner conducting.
WHEN WALTER GIESEKING
was soloist at a near-closing concert of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
under Dr. Eugene Goossens, he played the “Concerto in D minor, No. 3” of
Rachmaninoff, “so superbly that the audience sprang to its feet and shouted its
acclaim.”
VIOLINS AND VIOLINISTS
is a cheerful little journal filled with varied information of interest to
devotees of this “Queen of Instruments.” Several of its early numbers have been
coming as most welcome visitors to our desk. Good luck to our vigorous young
contemporary and its optimistic editor!
THE ST. LOUIS GRAND
OPERA ASSOCIATION is an opera venture underwritten by one hundred individuals
and firms to present opera on a non-profit basis—the second such enterprise in
the United States, with San Francisco as the first. Its bow to the public was
made on April 17th, with a performance of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” with Lauritz
Melchior, Danish tenor, and Marjorie Lawrence, Australian soprano, in the
leading roles. Verdi’s “Otello” followed on April 21st, and Gounod’s “Faust” on
the 24th. Metropolitan Opera Company artists interpreted all leading
characters.
TRAIPSIN’
WOMAN CABIN, eighteen miles south of Ashland, Kentucky, was the scene of the
Ninth Annual American Folk Song Festival on June 11th. Last Year twenty
thousand people from all lands treked the picturesque Mayo Trail to this
windowless little cabin to hear the mountain songs by mountain singers.
THE ANNUAL BACH FESTIVAL
at Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio, was held on June 9th and 10th with Dr.
Albert Riemenschneider conducting. The “St. Matthew Passion” was the item of
chief interest. Eminent vocal and instrumental artists contributed to the
programs.
DANTE FIORILLO, of
Westwood, New Jersey, has been awarded the Pulitzer traveling fellowship in
music, which is given each year “to the student of music in America deemed most
talented and deserving of this provision for European study.”
A “CONCERTO FOR
CLARINET,” by Henry Brant, has been awarded the One Hundred Dollar Prize
offered by the Society of Professional Musicians of New York.
ERNEST BLOCH’S new
“Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” had its first public performance when on a
program in London late in April, with Joseph Szigeti as soloist and Sir Thomas
Beecham leading the Philharmonic Society Orchestra.
PADEREWSKI’S FAREWELL TO
NEW YORK was to have been a concert at Madison Square Garden on the evening of
May 27th, and an audience of fifteen thousand was gathered for the event, when
the seventy-eight year old “Emperor of the Pianoforte” collapsed and had to be
taken to his private railway car that had carried him as far as Los Angeles and
back, while he played twenty of his scheduled twenty-five engagements. On
advice of his physician the “living immortal among musicians” cancelled the remaining
concerts and in the night of May 30th sailed on the Normandie for his home in
Switzerland.
THE
METROPOLITAN OPERA COMPANY drew sixty-eight thousand attendants to its eight
performances in one week, in April, at Cleveland, Ohio. Forty Thousand of these
came from outside Cleveland, with delegations from several bordering states.
THE SOCIETY OF EGYPTIAN
MUSIC, with the collaboration of the Egyptian State Broadcasting Company of
Cairo recently presented a program of chamber music, including the “Quartet in
F minor, Op. 10” of Hindemith ; “Sonata in B minor, fcr violin and piano” by
Respighi; the “Quartet in C major” by Hüttel; the “Trio with Piano, in C minor,
Op. 2,” by Suk; and “Starnelli e Ballade, for string quartet” by Malipiero. The
artists were M. M. Adolphe Menaszes, violin; Silvestro Catecchio, violin;
Joseph Hüttel, alto (viola) and piano; and Mayer Reininger, violoncello.
HERBERT L. CLARKE,
conductor of the Long Beach Municipal Band (California), and internationally
famous cornetist long soloist with the Sousa Band, received recently the
honorary degree of Doctor of Music, from Phillips University of Enid, Oklahoma.
TURKISH SONGS made up
the program of a gala concert given on February fourteenth, at Cairo, Egypt, by
the eminent Turkish singer, Mounir Nottedin Bey of the Conservatory of
Istanbul.
MISS HELEN L. CRAMM,
widely known American composer, especially of fascinating pieces for little
tots, passed away on June 14, at the age of eighty. Born at Pembroke, New
Hampshire, December 8, 1858, Haverhill, Massachusetts has been her home since
1872. Her musical education was received at the New England Conservatory,
supplemented by studies with eminent private teachers. Her compositions and
compilations are numbered by the score; and these exhibited her peculiar genius
for melody which gave a charm to all she wrote. Her reputation as a teacher was
second only to that as a composer.
MARCELLA SEMBRICH,
internationally famous soprano, and for many years of the Metropolitan Opera
Company, and Edward de Coppet, eminent patron of music and especially of the
great Flonzaley Quartet, are to be honored by bronze plaques on two endowed
chairs in the Town Hall of New York, as “tributes to those whose work and worth
inspire those who come hither to emulate their example.”
JOSE ITURBI, pianist and
conductor, has had a season of brilliant success at the head of the Orchestra
of the Theatre Colon of Buenos-Ayres.
WHAT A BLOW to our
American musical art. The management of the New York World’s Fair announced on
May 24th that after May 29th “all programs of classical music scheduled for the
Hall of Music would be cancelled,” and that popular music at popular prices
would be substitute (sic) . So Commercialism
literally kicks Frau Art out of bed.
“THE OLD MAID AND THE
THIEF” by Gian-Carlo Menotti, twenty-seven year old American composer, and the
first opera to be commissioned by N. B. C. for radio, had its world premiere on
April 22nd, with the collaboration of the N. B. C. Orchestra; and with Mary
Hopple as The Old Maid, Robert Weede as Son of the Trail, Margaret
Daum as Letitia, and Dorothy Sarnoff as Miss Pinkerton. Alberto
Erede conducted, and Joseph Curton, as Narrator, set the stage and
linked the episodes.
THE SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY of Natanael Berg, the
eminent Swedish composer was celebrated by the Philharmonic Orchestra of
Stockholm which invited him to conduct a program of his own works, including
his “Fourth Symphony, ‘The Seasons’ “; his widely played “Concerto for Piano,
and Orchestra,” with W. Witkowsky as soloist; and “The Hymn of Israel” for
mixed chorus and orchestra.
ST. LOUIS SUMMER OPERA
at Forest Park opened with a performance of Friml’s “Rose Marie” on the evening
of June 2nd; and it will close with the American premiere of “Victoria and Her
Husband.”
THE HORATIO PARKER
FELLOWSHIP for musical composition, in the American Academy of Rome, has been
awarded to William Douglas Denny of Berkeley, California.
THE ANNUAL BERKSHIRE SYMPHONIC
FESTIVAL, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Serge
Koussevitzky, is announced for August 3rd, 5th, 6th, 10th, 12th and 13th, in
the new Tanglewood Shed which has been completed at an expense of $91,193.95.
SOLANGE DELMAS,
coloratura soprano of the Grand Opera of Paris, is announced for a concert tour
o#f the United States during the coming season.
A FOUR-DAY MOZART
FESTIVAL at the Juilliard Graduate School of New York City, was opened on April
25th by the production of an English version of “The Marriage of Figaro.”
KARL W. GEHRKENS, Editor
of the “Questions and Answers”
columns of The
Etude and Musical Editor of
the Webster New International Dictionary, received on June 13th, the honorary
degree of Doctor of Music, from Capital University of Columbus, Ohio. On June
6th, he and Carl Wilhelm Kern, with many musical works in the catalogs of the
Theodore Presser Company and other publishers, received the same degree from
Illinois Wesleyan University of Bloomington, Illinois.
THE NORTH SHORE FESTIVAL
of Evanston (Chicago), Illinois, was revived with an opening performance on May
16th of Bach’s “Passion According to St. Matthew,” after a lapse of several
years because of unsettled business conditions. Dr. Frederick Stock infused “a
reverential, awesome quality” into this master work, as he led the chorus,
soloists and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra “through its mystic and worshipful
score.”
RAVINIA PARK, Chicago,
long the stronghold of Mr. Louis Eckstein’s wonderful pet opera company, has
forsaken the lyric muse and on June 29th began a series of symphonic concerts
to last till August 6th.
THE PRINCESS OF PIEDMONT
was a participant in the second representation of Ravel’s “l’Enfant et les
Sortileges (The Child and Witchcraft) ” and Vecchi’s “L’Amphiparnasso (Around
Parnassus),” when these works were performed in the May Festival of Florence,
Italy.
THE PHILADELPHIA OPERA
COMPANY announces six performances for the coming season: Mozart’s “The
Marriage of Figaro”; Gounod’s “Faust”; Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly”; Bizet’s
“Carmen”; Verdi’s “La Traviata”; and Strauss’s “Der Fledermaus.”
THE NINTH ANNUAL
FESTIVAL of American Music was held at Rochester, New York, from April 24th to
28th, sponsored by the Eastman School of Music under the direction of Dr.
Howard Hanson. Twenty- five works of native composers were heard, and several
of them for the first time.
THE AMERICAN GUILD OF
BANJOISTS, Mandolinists and Guitarists held its thirty-eighth annual convention
from July 5th to 8th, inclusive, at Providence, Rhode Island. Teachers, students
and visiting players had the privilege of seeing an imposing display of
published music for their favorite instruments.
“THE DEVIL AND DANIEL
WEBSTER,” an American folk opera by Douglas Moore, in the style of the German
singspiel with spoken dialogue and occasional music, had its premiere on May
18th and at the same time served to dedicate the “impressively sponsored”
American Lyric Theater of New York.
