Staccato

In the spring, the music world behaves irregularly. Grand operas and orchestras pack up and travel. Divas obey their pocketbooks or their temperaments. Experimenters trump their partners' aces. Hinterland critics cry bravo. Last week's news:

P: Like the delicately poised structure of a mighty cathedral is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Fittingly, his B Minor Mass was sung and played in magnificent St. Thomas's Episcopal Church, Manhattan, by the Bach Cantata Club of New York. But the effect was diminished because the acoustics of churches in general, and of St. Thomas's in particular, are appalling.

P: In Berlin, Erich Kleiber, chief conductor of the State Opera, refused to take a five-year contract with the Metropolitan Opera of Manhattan. He took the advice of the Prussian Minister of Fine Arts, anticipated another successful season in Berlin.

P: A jury in Cleveland, Ohio, awarded Richardo Dellera, assistant conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, $1,000 damages from the Green Cab Co. He had sued for $25,000 because a taxicab driver had impaired his piano technique by slamming a door on his fingers, two years ago. Soprano Marion Talley testified that his fingers were in pretty bad shape.

P: Also in Cleveland, the Metropolitan Opera Company exhibited its wares and Soprano Talley received the critics' superlatives that had been denied her during her Manhattan season.

P: While automobiling, she skidded, broke an arm. But she had it put in splints, kept a concert engagement in London. Her name: Esther Dale, minor U. S. soprano.

P: "Music has here entombed a rich treasure but still fairer hopes. Franz Schubert lies here. Born Jan. 31, 1797; died Nov. 19, 1828, thirty-one years old." This, the epitaph on the beloved composer's tomb in Vienna, was quoted last week when Katherine Bacon gave a stirring piano recital of his works in Town Hall, Manhattan. Meanwhile, it was announced that some 500 manuscripts had been submitted for the $20,000 prize contest for orchestral compositions in honor of Franz Schubert, sponsored by the Columbia Phonograph Co. National origins of manuscripts were:

United States 71

Germany 69

Norway, Sweden, Denmark 64

Austria 62

Great Britain 58

France 48

Italy 45

Spain 38

Russia 29

Poland 29

P: The National Music Week (May 6 to 12) Association found out that Stephen C. Foster's Old Folks at Home was the favorite U. S. composition of the majority of 150 selected U. S. musicians.