Facile Musicians

Already this season having kept their time & wits to the visiting leadership of visiting Frit?, Busch, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Arthur Rodzinski, Evgene Goossens, Maurice Ravel--the facile musicians of the New York Symphony Orchestra last week beat, blew & bowed to the conducting of Oskar Fried, guest from Berlin on his first conductorial visit to the U. S.

To him the symphony orchestra was his instrument, its players his keys, stops & treadles; and on them he pressed, shoved & stepped twice last week at a tempo & pressure that made, for example, his finale of Brahm's C Minor Symphony the fulminant of a Manhattan explosion of applause. The players were both glad that they were done with him and proud that their skill had met his demands. For the beat of his baton brevets a player an artist.

No less skilled in the art of the orchestra was Enrique Fernandez Arbos from Spain, who followed Oskar Fried in leading the orchestra. His also was his first visit as a conductor, although 25 years ago he had been concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. From Boston he had been called to become permanent director of the Madrid Symphony Orchestra, then a ragged organization of men who played, well and seldom, music of all nations but Spain. That was because for 12 years foreign guest conductors had been hired, who had no interest, no experience with indigenous music.

Conductor Arbos established Spanish composers and his orchestra on good footing. Halffter, de Falla, Carelli, Espla, Turina, Granados, Albeniz, del Campo, Salazar and many another gained courage & the means of living.

His orchestra trouped around Spain, slept in towns, hamlets & villages. Everywhere sprang up a latent desire for music, and musical organizations flourished at

Barcelona, San Sebastian, Pamplona, Valencia, and Bilboa as well as at Madrid.

His leading of the New York Symphony Orchestra--through the first U. S. performance of Ernest Halffter's Sinfonietta and his own orchestral transcription of Albeniz's La Fete de Dieu a Seville and Triana--was graceful, gentle & genteel.