Koussevitsky Triumphant

Concerts are beginning to lose the careless informality of other days. Neither the performers nor the audience used to bother much about getting to them on time. It used to be long after the appointed hour before the conductor made his initial bow, and long after that before any appreciable portion of those to whom he was supposedly bowing began to trickle in. And it never used to be long before they started to trickle out again. All of which was a circumstance not particularly favorable to the perfect audition of orchestral music.

It is typical of this day of prompter and better music that Serge Koussevitsky, his orchestra and most of his audience were all in Symphony Hall on the occasion of his first appearance as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But it was due wholly to Mr. Koussevitsky's accomplished and masterful rendering of a program including Berlioz' overture, Roman Carnival, Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Haydn and, notably, Honegger's Pacific, 231, that the enthusiastic audience was still there practically en masse at the end of the program.

Honegger's arresting translation into musical terms of the progress of a powerful locomotive hurtling through the night met with a reception almost unprecedented for a modernist composer.

In Manhattan

The Philharmonic. Eager ears have finally been greeted by the first orchestral music of the season. The first to break the summer's silence was Mr. Van Hoogstraten with the Philharmonic. The major feature of the program was the Sinfonia Drammatica of Ottorino Respighi. Signer Respighi has hitherto been known as the composer of the agreeable Fontane di Roma. His latest offering, while it has never before been heard in Manhattan, actually was composed before the other, and shows it. It is an effective com- position, but with traces of immaturity and it is unhappily reminiscent. There is Tchaikovsky in it, and Puccini, Strauss and, above all, Wagner. But it was well and carefully delivered and welcomed with enthusiasm by the audience. A little perplexity was caused by the fact that, obviously a piece of program music, no key was given to its meaning. The orchestra itself is better than ever.

Manhattan Opera House. The Manhattan Opera House, last week, had the distinction of presenting two artists who give place to none in the position they hold in the eyes of the public. First came Anna Pavlowa, for a "farewell season." The instrument of her return was a ballet based on Cervantes' Don Quixote, Mme. Pavlowa taking the dual role of the Barcelona innkeeper's daughter and Dulcinea del Toboso. When she made her initial entrance among more than 80 other performers, she was at once recognized; and the Manhattan audience shook with enthusiastic applause for five minutes.

The stage of the Manhattan was the scene also of the first appearance in the U. S., this season, of Feodor Chaliapin, incomparable Russian basso. He brought with him all his mannerisms, smiled irresistibly on his audience, wielded his lorgnette (with a gold handle) and his handkerchief and sang with dramatic power and genius which has never been equaled.

As usual, Mr. Chaliapin prepared no program in advance. Each song was announced by number from the stage, the numbers ostensibly corresponding to those in a printed wordbook previously distributed. The excellence of his renditions was in no way marred by the fact that the numbers often failed to correspond.

Notable features of the selection were Schumann's Two Grenadiers, Schubert's Serenade, Sakhnovsky's Death Stalks Before Me.

Nearly 1,000 people had to be turned away from the theatre, which was crowded even to the stage. The colossal Russian's next appearance will be on the stage of the Metropolitan in the first week of the operatic season, in the role of Boris Godounov--his masterpiece of impersonation.

Antics. Vladimir de Pachmann contrives to make music a thing to be seen as well as heard. He chats with his audience, gestures at them, boasts to them, giggles with them, pursues the final diminuendo of a Chopin Prelude under the piano, performs merry little antics for the benefit of a delighted public. Lawrence Gilman, critic for The New York Herald Tribune, speaks of "cretinous* capers."

As to the merit of Mr. de Pachmann in the practice of his art, critics differ. There is a certain difficulty in estimating the proficiency of an agreeable old fellow who persists in distracting your attention by a rapid fire of chatty comment and sportive gesture. His work is uneven--varying from snatches of irresistible and unfamiliar beauty to heinous sins against the purest of arts. Anyway, he is worth watching.

Bach. An all-Bach program is a rare and alarming event. To attempt such a thing shows moral heroism and crowning self-confidence. To attempt it successfully shows an amazing talent, a masterly technique. Harold Samuel, British apostle of Johann Sebastian Bach, showed all of those qualities at his first recital in Aeolian Hall.

His program was skillfully varied. After all, Bach may be Bach, but there is nothing notably narrow about his range. And Mr. Samuel suddenly woke Bach up. He has slumbered too long under the smothering solemnity of his acolytes. He has been too much studied and too much feared. Mr. Samuel is not at all afraid of him, yet lacks not a jot of respect for the genius of Leipsig. He treats him with skill, with feeling, with sympathy.

The program included one of the sel- dom-heard English suites, selections from the Well-Tempered Clavichord, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. There was even jollity in Mr. Samuel's rendition of the saraband of the English Suite.

In Frankfort

Germany regards herself as the home of opera. She rather resents any non-Teutonic effort. The very idea of an Anglo-Saxon operatic composition seems to her a little absurd-- certainly farfetched. For this reason no American has hitherto ventured with impunity to present the musical dramas of his making within her borders.

Simon Bucharoff, Chicagoan, is nevertheless preparing to beard the Teutonic lion in his own den. His opera, Sakahra, is about to be produced in Frankfort. The book, dealing with the familiar brother and sister who did not know they were kin until their affection had reached a stage neither brotherly nor sisterly, was written by Isabel Buckingham, also of Chicago.

*From the noun cretin, meaning idiot or village fool. A cretin is a creature of nightmare, humanity's most loathsome being. The word, even in adjectival form, is seldom used jocularly by people of discrimination, since one is seldom called upon to refer with jocularity to the most abject embodiment of mankind on earth.