Stadium Wind-Up

"Three cheers for Albert Coates and the Soviet Union!" cried a young Manhattanite early this month when Conductor Coates took over the last half of the Stadium concerts of the New York-Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra. Albert Coates tried to look unconcerned during the prolonged applause, making only the vaguest of gestures. Then he bobbed ebulliently over his orchestra, resembling greatly a Roman emperor, although illness last spring had reduced his weight from 240 lb. to 200 Ib. From night to night thereafter he presided over such various Stadium doings as four all-Russian programs, the Hall Johnson Choir, the Albertina Rasch dancers, an all-Gershwin concert--all with the practiced versatility which has made him, if not the most exciting of maestros, a thoroughly dependable musician, one to be envied by many another less sure of his bread & butter.

Last June Albert Coates got a notable job: the general music directorship of the United Philharmonic Orchestras of the U. S. S. R. and musical directorship of the opera houses of Moscow and Leningrad. Last year Conductor Coates had plenty to do; he might conduct a Boris Godounov in Moscow one night, hurry off to rehearse in Leningrad the next morning. Next year he will be even busier. Besides working with the excellent orchestras and operas of Russia's two chief cities, he must improve the mediocre ones at Tiflis, Baku, Kiev, Kharkov, Svendlovsk, Stalingrad and possibly others. For his work Conductor Coates will have a share (how much he will not say) in the U. S. S. R.'s Cultural & Educational Appropriation, which was two billion dollars in 1931.

No proletarian by birth is Soviet Director Coates. He was born in St. Petersburg, son of a Russianized British capitalist (woolen mills) and a half-Russian Englishwoman. He grew up in Russia, studied under Rimsky-Korsakov. Vaguely intending to become an electrical chemist, he studied in England under Sir Oliver Lodge. At 18 he returned to music. In 1914, aged 32, he became senior conductor at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg, stayed there until the Revolution. He did not settle again in Russia until last year. When Conductor Coates arrived in Manhattan last month he seemed thoroughly Russianized, voluble in praise of Soviet music. He talked of 21-year-old Dmitri Shostakovitch ("marvellous, a second Mozart!"), Tchoporin the lawyer, who had written an "absolutely remarkable" Soviet Symphony, Nikolai Miaskovsky whose Twelfth Symphony contrasts the new Russia with the old.

Biggest night of the Stadium season came during last week, the final week when 17,000 people jammed their way into the Stadium (a record) and 4,000 more were turned away grumbling. It was the first concert ever dedicated entirely to the works of George Gershwin. Alternating on the podium were Conductor Coates and William Merrigan Daly, radio and Broadway conductor, onetime managing editor of Everybody's Magazine (Walter Lippmann was his assistant in 1914). At the piano were Composer Gershwin and able Oscar Levant, 25.

To a few captious folk this outlay of Gershwin revealed a weakness of structure, a lack of variety. But most of the Stadiumgoers were well content to take Gershwin's agile, rhythmic music on its own terms. They had heard before The Rhapsody in Blue, the sly American in Paris, the workman-like Concerto in F. From familiar Gershwin shows came the overture to "Of Thee I Sing," "Wintergreen for President," and a medley of "Fascinating Rhythm." "Liza," "The Man I Love," "I Got Rhythm." New to the Stadium were the other two numbers, conducted by Albert Coates: the highbrow Second Rhapsody, in which the metropolis is typified by insistent rivet-noises; and a new Rumba which George Gershwin completed last month. He got the idea last February in a low street in Havana called La Frita. The Rumba is a "symphonic overture" based on Cuban themes, for full orchestra plus bongo (tom-tom), maracas (rattle), gourd and sticks. At its first hearing it seemed lengthy, sometimes dull; but were it tightened up it might well compete with Ravel's Bolero, a work more shrewdly conceived but of considerably less musical interest.

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