Season's Crop

A tall, spindling girl with bare legs and a Buster Brown haircut bowed her way on to Manhattan's Town Hall stage one night last week, tucked a violin under her chin and with rare self-possession proceeded to establish herself as one of the promising prodigies of the 1935-36 season. She was Marjorie Edwards, 13, of San Jose, Calif., who traveled East for the first time last summer to play at the Berkshire Festival. This time she was back to face the test of a more formal debut.

Most experienced critics have little patience with the rank & file of young musicians who want to play in public. Marjorie Edwards was well above the average. She exhibited a real flair for the violin, fast-flying fingers that found the notes surely, an earnest sensitive approach to the music she played. Even so, finicky critics refused to pronounce her ripe for a concert career. The quality of her tone was often small and immature, best suited to the soft feathery Cuckoo which delighted her audience so much that she had to play it twice.

Unlike many a prodigy, young Marjorie Edwards is a natural, unthwarted person who rides a bicycle, collects stamps, wishes she could tap dance better than she does, reveres Yehudi Menuhin. Her father is an automobile salesman in San Jose, her mother a piano teacher who has given lessons to the grocer's child and taken food for pay. Young Marjorie drummed out piano scales long before she was given her first violin. But the fiddle revealed her talent. At 9 she had progressed so far that she was taken the 60 miles to San Francisco several times a week to study with Kathleen Parlow, who suggested the first trip East. Indomitable Mrs. Edwards was easy to convince. Money was scarce but there was the 10-year-old, seven-passenger Marmon and Son Carl, 16, to drive it. The Edwards motored East to the Berkshire Festival, motored back again as far as Lovelock, Nev., where the Marmon caught fire. Of the baggage nothing was saved except Marjorie's violin.

P: In Philadelphia this winter the most amazing young musician has been Hilda Margot Betty Ros, a 10-year-old, olive-skinned Cuban, chosen by Conductor Leopold Stokowski to play the Mozart E Flat Concerto at his first Children's Concert. The Mozart concerto demands a sensitive hairline delicacy, particularly suited to young Margot's style of playing. With the praise she received, the Cuban prodigy could have gone on to make flashy headlines. Instead, she stuck to her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, lives in one room with her mother, father, two sisters. A subsidy from the Cuban Government barely gives them enough to eat.

P: In Los Angeles the pick of the prodigy crop seemed to be Felix Abcede, 9, a chubby, black-haired Filipino who played last December in the Philharmonic auditorium, created such a furor that he was perched on a chair to receive autograph hounds. Young Felix was scheduled to play in San Francisco soon afterwards. That concert never came off because his parents were at odds and his teacher raised a fracas. Victim was the boy violinist, a pawn now involved in a bitter legal controversy. Often he has been told that he is greater than Heifetz or Kreisler.

P: Chicago's latest violin prodigy is a nudist, the 4-year-old son of a lawyer couple, who has been brought up on a raw vegetable diet and plenty of uncooked fruit. Though David ("Doddie") Davis has yet to prove himself on any concert platform, he has already amazed the faculty at Chicago Musical College. He arrives for his lessons clad in loin cloth and cape, sheds the cape as soon as he gets inside, demands more air even in sub-zero weather. Fortnight ago David Davis was taken to California to spend the rest of the winter. But he was scarcely underway before he was hankering for his lessons. Teacher Max Fischel admits that David is not always a model pupil. When he feels too warm he will shout: "I'm sweating bullets." When he was asked lately to repeat a certain passage he balked completely, said: "To hell with it. I'm sick of it."

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