Summer Season

P:Chicago's summer music season began last month at Ravinia (TIME, July 1).

P:San Francisco's season began last fortnight, in San Mateo's cool Woodland Theatre. At eight Sunday concerts, five eminent conductors--Bernardino Molinari, Alfred Hertz, Eugene Goossens, Ernest Bloch, Bruno Walter--will in turn lead the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

P:Boston's summer music began last week on the Charles River Basin Esplanade. Under the leadership of Arthur Fiedler, 45 members of Serge Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra will present a trial series of free concerts.

P:In Manhattan, the Philharmonic last week began a twelfth season under the patronage of Adolph Lewisohn. Willem van Hoogstraten, winter conductor for Portland, Ore., is, for the eighth successive summer, conductor and cynosure at the nightly concerts in Lewisohn Stadium. Last week he had just returned from mountain climbing in Mittenwald, Bavaria (famed for violins), with his daughter Eleonor, eleven. Eleonor goes to school in Switzerland, prefers sailing on her father's 20-ft. sloop. Last week she went to Chicago to visit her divorced mother, Pianist Elly Ney.* Mr. van Hoogstraten's hobby is sailing; his horror, fishing.

His first concert of the eight-week season, held indoors because of a storm, was a celebration. It was Patron Lewisohn's 80th birthday. Mr. Hoogstraten, sunburned, flanneled, led a shirtsleeved orchestra. During the intermission Mr. Lewisohn fluttered the pages of his customary welcoming speech.

It is Adolph Lewisohn's firm belief that good music not only pleases summer enthusiasts, but reduces crime. A reformer of prisons, he collects rare Bibles, impressionistic paintings. He likes to play cards, to win, to sing, to dance.

For his private pleasure and the public's good, Conductor van Hoogstraten with the aid of Music Critic Lawrence Gilman, has arranged a longer-than-ever list of special features. Old favorites: The Hall Johnson Negro Choir, Anna Duncan, the Denishawns, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in B-flat. Innovations: George Gershwin's "An American in Paris,'' Deems Taylor's "Jurgen," Edward Burlingame Hill's Symphony in B Flat, Ernest Bloch's rhapsody "America" (with 500-voice chorus). Albert Coates of London, as guest conductor during August, has promised his own Scherzo from The Pickwick Papers, subtitled "The Elopement of the Spinster Aunt."

*Who will play in Hollywood's Bowl next fortnight.