Hot Weather Harvest

Of the dozen or so U. S. cities where during the summer bands and orchestras play good music to easygoing audiences in stadiums and parks, most had seasons under way last week.

P: To play six nights and one matinee a week at Cleveland's Great Lakes Exposition, a Great Lakes Symphony was organized, drawing 100 men from the Cleveland Symphony, Detroit Symphony. New York Philharmonic Symphony. Guest leaders during the summer were to be Hans Kindler of Washington, D. C., Erno Rapee of the radio, Frank Black. National Broadcasting Co.'s general musical director. Karl Krueger of Kansas City and that most ubiquitous of summer conductors, Jose Iturbi. Also during the summer in Cleveland's Public Auditorium the Pittsburgh and Cincinnati Symphonies would be sandwiched in between free concerts by Rudy Vallee, Wayne King. Paul Whiteman. Guy Lombardo and Major Bowes.

P:The St. Louis Municipal ("Muny" Opera, not opera at all but musicomedy well mounted in a bosky open-air theatre, performed The Three Musketeers, No, No, Nanette, promised Sons o' Guns for this week, the U. S. premiere of Ivor Novello's Glamorous Night.

P:The Cincinnati Zoo Opera spruced up its ten-week repertoire with Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson and The King's Henchman, offered such singers as Bruna Castagna, Anna Leskaya, Rosa Tentoni. Edward Molitore, Norman Cordon. Cordon, a North Carolina basso, used to sing on the Baume Bengue radio hour, made a small hit with the Metropolitan Opera's late spring season (TIME. May 25). C In Atlantic City the Steel Pier Opera opened its ninth season, with Henri Elkan conducting Martha. Ambitiously its repertoire included Bach's Phoebus and Pan, Beethoven's Fidelia, Debussy's L'Enfant Prodigue.

P:A new orchestra, the Essex County Symphony, completed its second week of concerts under Erno Rapee in a stadium near Newark, N. J. Audiences discovered that no longer need they suffer from New Jersey's mosquitoes, thanks to a new larvicide with which the air was sprayed.

P: On Belle Isle near Detroit this week the Detroit Symphony, heeled with $185,000 raised in a maintenance drive, was to begin the first series of free nightly concerts since 1931. Conductor: Victor Kolar of the Ford radio symphony.

P: To Philadelphia last week went plump Paul Whiteman with 27 picked instrumentalists, vocalists, arrangers and composers, to give two joint concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra as a curtain raiser to that organization's summer season in Robin Hood Dell. Because the Philadelphia musicians play on a cooperative basis, never knowing what their salaries will be, Conductor Whiteman donated most of his men's services, asking only expenses and $1,500 for crack Arranger Adolph Deutsch. During rehearsals Whiteman perspired through a green shirt, puffed a long cigar. Violinist Arthur Lipkin, chairman of the Dell concerts, went through an anti-rain ceremony on the strength of his having been made Honorary Medicine Man.& Rainmaker by Navajo Indians during the Philadelphians' national tour (TIME, April 27). It rained on one of the two nights.

Notable at the Whiteman-Philadelphia concerts was a tone poem by Ferde Grofe called Tabloid, scored for orchestra, electric siren, four typewriters, eight revolvers. According to City Editor George Clarke of the New York Mirror, who wrote the program notes, Tabloid had representations of comic-strip characters, a murder, sob sisters and sport writers at work, a whole newspaper going to press. Critics found Composer Grofe's latest work exciting but unmusical, liked best Mr. Whiteman doing good reliable Gershwin. Two nights later the Dell season officially opened, with the audience cheering Beethoven's Eroica as done by swart, chunky Conductor-Pianist Jose Iturbi.

P:That busy Spaniard, suffering no permanent hurt from the airplane accident he was in last spring in Trinidad (TIME, April 20), had arrived during the fortnight from a South American tour, had flown to Detroit, then back to Manhattan to open the summer season at the Lewisohn Stadium. Iturbi said he was booked for 47 U. S. concerts during the summer. In the Lewisohn Stadium, where three years ago he managed for the first time to make the U. S. think of him as a conductor, Iturbi appeared in a white flannel suit, dark blue shirt and white tie, played Beethoven vigorously. The audience approved the addition of tables at which to sit and drink during the concert.

P:On Zach's Bay, a quiet body of water at Jones Beach, 40 miles out from Manhattan on Long Island, a 136-ft.-by-82-ft. stage was moored opposite a stand seating 10,000 people. There last week opened a season of opera, operetta and ballet managed by Fortune Gallo of the San Carlo Opera Company. First performance was Carmen which the audience beheld from a considerable distance, heard mostly through loudspeakers.

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