New York

The Wagnerian Opera Festival should teach a lesson to producers of opera: You can't go out and pick up an orchestra as you would a pair of shoes. The singers are in most respects excellent artists. One could easily call them outright a great troupe if it were not for the matter of acoustics. The Germans are playing at the Manhattan Opera House. Vocalists may have beautiful, ringing tone in that auditorium, which in another theatre they lack. But the singers of the Wagnerian Festival seem excellent, notably the baritone Schorr. By comparison they have made the orchestra all the more an abomination. The company picked up a group of musicians hurriedly, and put them through the ticklish walks, paces, and gallops of pieces like Die Meistersinger and Tristan. Conductor Blech is an excellent director, but the Archangel Gabriel, himself, would have his troubles with a group of players hastily recruited, and thrown into such a fray as the last half of the Meistersinger prelude.

The New York Symphony Orchestra exhibited in its concerts of last Thursday afternoon and Friday evening, a new guest conductor. He was Bruno Walter, of much reputation in Germany, where he conducts the Munich Opera. Walter is especially renowned as a conductor of Mozart. He directed the symphony in D of the Salzburg composer. It would not be too rash to state outright that it was the finest Mozart conducting to be heard in the world today. Walter very sensibly cut down the orchestra to eighteenth century propositions. He achieved an exquisite balance of tone. It was no case of the huge mass of modern strings drowning the small body of woodwinds, as usually happens, with the result that you hear little more than a monotonous orchestra of violins. Mozart sounded very modern in orchestration, with a rich and varied blending of winds and strings. Walter brought much clarity and grace into the gigantic C minor symphony of Brahms, but he dragged it at times.

Mr. Gatti-Casazza, of the Metropolitan, is full of surprises. His latest was a performance, for the first time in America, of Schilling's Mona Lisa. The opera is an ingenious attempt to explain the smile on the face of Da Vinci's famous portrait. The prologue and epilogue present a young wife with her old husband, sight-seeing in Florence. Both parts are taken by newcomers to the Metropolitan -- Barbara Kemp, of the Berlin Opera, and Michael Bohnen, of the Munich Opera. The roles are dual. In the two acts of the piece they appear as Mona Lisa and her husband, in a story told by a young monk (Mr. Taucher), who impersonates also Mona Lisa's youthful lover, whom she had been forced to discard to marry Francesco di Gioconda.

William Van Hoogstraten was chosen to take the place of Josef Stransky, recently resigned, as conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra, along with William Mengelberg. Both Mr. Mengelberg and Mr. Van Hoogstraten are Hollanders. With his wife, Mme. Elly Ney, pianist, the latter came to New York for the first time last season, when he twice conducted the Philharmonic, with his wife as soloist.