Gershwin

When George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" was played by Paul Whiteman's orchestra last year, critics knew that they were listening for the first time to the voice of Broadway talking in its sleep; they were listening to the hot-lipped, two-timing, razz-m'tazzle moan of the saxophones that chuckle and the whistles that whine in the cabarets of Charleston, Memphis, Chicago, in San Francisco roof-gardens and the honkey-tonk joints of Tia Juana; they were listening to tones as strident as peroxided hair, to rhythms that strutted like Negro girls in diamond tiaras. "The most authentic piece of music," said Carl Van Vechten, "that ever came out of America." Critics hurried to crown with bayleaf the youthful brow of George Gershwin. Walter Damrosch besought him to write a jazz concerto for the New York Symphony Society; Composer Gershwin said he would.

Last week the long-heralded composition, "Concerto in F" was played in Carnegie Hall; with Mr. Damrosch conducting, Mr. Gershwin at the piano, and all the fine fiddlers, horn-blowers and hide-thumpers of the Symphony Orchestra in attendance.

Conductor Damrosch beamed. At last the throaty and macabre yowl of modern America was about to be lifted into a new melodic line; patrons were about to learn that there is no modern music worth mentioning except the flawed melodies that a very old barroom piano, operated by a coin, can send tilting, spilling, staggering, into the languor of a summer twilight.

Mr. Damrosch raised his arm and thereafter the assembled audience listened intently for a considerable time. They heard pinguid plati- tudes of the symphonic concert hall resuscitated; they heard discreet echoes of Tschaikowsky, of Stravinsky, of Rachmaninov; they heard sentimental melodies in pseudo-jazz they heard the anxiously im- mature opus of a youth who--no longer child of the Cyclades and of Broadway--has become an earnest aspirant for musical respectability. There was nothing daring, nothing racy, nothing even individual Law- rence Gilman said:

"We need not discuss the question whether his 'Concerto in F' is good jazz or not; that seems to us relatively unimportant beside the question whether it is good music or not; and we think it is only fairish music--conventional, trite, at its worst a little dull."

Notes

Tenor Beniamino Gigli, who has refused all offers to sing over the radio, saying that it would take $50,000 to induce him to broadcast a concert, last week signed a contract to give the Christmas week concert of the Atwater Kent Co., Philadelphia, on Dec. 27. A curtain was held and the audience waited uneasily between the first and second acts of Herodiade at the Chicago Auditorium while call boys went to tell William Beck, baritone, that it was time to go on as Vitellius. Baritone Beck was not to be found in his dressing room. A messenger hurried to his hotel, found the baritone lying in bed. He was dead.

Carmela Ponselle (of Meriden, Conn.) made her debut in Aida, while her sister Rosa sat applauding in a box. For the first time since the De Reszke brothers, two members of one family are Metropolitan stars.