Antic Symphonies

A hunt was on in Chicago last week for a frying-pan that would sound A flat, a soup plate that would give G sharp, a tea cup in B. Four erratic-looking men went from one Loop store to another, producing pitch-pipes, whacking on merchandise with wooden spoons. Clerks tried to interest them in bargains. Customers tittered and asked bewildered floorwalkers what it was all about. But the four strange shoppers went on about their business. They were assembling a kitchen orchestra for part of the thank-you concert that the Chicago Symphony was giving the patrons who had subscribed $59,340 toward the $70,000 deficit. At the concert, motherly Mrs. Stock laughed until she wheezed. She had never known that her Frederick and his men could clown so. For one act the bassoon choir came out like monks and played an intermezzo; for another, little Carl Rink aped a violin prodigy while the other musicians played cards, rustled through newspapers. Four policemen arrested Manager Henry Voegeli when Trombonist Arthur Gunther (220 lb.) appeared in pink tights, attempted a fan-dance. But the evening's high point was the kitchen symphony (Messrs. Metzenger. Veseley, Sayers and Kopp) for which the four strange shoppers--the orchestra's percussion players--dressed up like chefs, stood between a big stove and a crockery-laden table and accurately tapped out note for note the Allegretto from Beethoven's Eighth Symphony. Oldtimers remembered that Theodore Thomas, father of Chicago's music, put on the same act 29 years ago. That the Orchestra will live to give it again was assured by the donations of last week's guests. At the farewell concert three days later the Chicago's 44th season was definitely announced. The Boston Symphony's surprise concert last week was not so hilarious as Chicago's. Conductor Serge Koussevitzky and his men dressed up in 18th Century wigs and ruffles, played with candles lighting their music racks, disappeared one by one until only Koussevitzky was left at the spinet and on a screen flashed the lines: "You have heard Haydn's Farewell Symphony. May your orchestra never play its own." Surprise came when Koussevitzky announced that he had never really heard his own double-bass concerto. He went and sat in the audience while Ludwig Juht, one of the orchestra's bull-fiddlers, played it. For the Boston Symphony's emergency fund the concert earned $17,500.

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