Swedish Night

While Chicago music lovers were squirming last winter under the worst Chicago operas they had ever heard. Conductor Ebba Sundstrom was swooping her Woman's Symphony Orchestra through its tenth, most gratifying season (TIME, Dec. 16, 1935). Long before her last concert it became clear that the Opera's loss was the Symphony's gain, that the woman's orchestra might look for more subscriptions, bigger patrons this autumn. Flushed with success, many patrons felt that a more dynamic, impressive conductor than Ebba Sundstrom should be billed. As a compromise, they packed her off to Europe to hobnob with composers, improve her languages, acquire polish. Back she came this fall to an orchestra moved into the big Chicago Auditorium, to a board of directors headed by rich and beauteous Mrs. Edward Morris, to the brightest prospect she has ever had. Last week when some 2,000 people poured into the hall for her opening concert, blonde, strapping Mrs. Sundstrom showed herself as good a strategist as she is musician.

When the conductor took her familiar, choppy steps across the stage and mounted the podium, she faced 200-odd singers as ruddy-faced, golden-haired and Nordic as herself. At her feet, lost in the dusk and their black dresses, sat the 80 women who make up her orchestra. To pay her respects to Scandinavia and the thousands of Chicagoans who came from there, Conductor Sundstrom had planned a predominantly Swedish program, packed the stage with Chicago's Swedish Choral Society, brought with her Swedish Contralto Gertrud Wettergren, the big, brown-haired, rawboned Valkyrie who first sang with the Stockholm Opera in 1922, took parts in two Swedish talking pictures, excited Manhattan audiences last winter by the sparkle and passion of her Carmen, so endeared her singing to Sweden's King Gustaf V that he made her court singer last July (TIME, July 13).

With long, pendulum-like swings of the arm and huge, rhythmic rockings of her body from the heels up, Conductor Sundstrom carried chorus and orchestra through excerpts from Wagner's Tannhauser, Elgar's King Olaf, Grieg's Olaf Tryggvason. Heated, enthusiastic, she swung next into a Schumann symphony, had to wipe her perspiring brow after the first movement. She had picked up enough energy in her European trip to satisfy everybody and to make Daily News Critic Eugene Stinson find the orchestra "well nigh unrecognizable, so firmly has Ebba Sundstrom increased her grasp over her players since last spring."

Regal in a fur-trimmed, flamingo gown, Contralto Wettergren went through her usual Swedish rigmarole of demanding a kick in the rear for good luck on her open-ing night. Beauteous Mrs. Edward Morris performed this kickoff. Then Wettergren rippled through an aria from Thomas' Mignon, squatted rather than bowed to accept a bouquet of chrysanthemums from the Swedish Choral Society. But what brought the Chicago audience to its feet and earned Singer Wettergren five encores was a group of Swedish and Finnish songs. She sang these, according to Critic Claudia Cassidy of the business-like Journal of Commerce, "with such richness of voice, such simplicity of phrasing and such communicative charm that they enchanted an audience almost 100 per cent at sea as to their meaning."

With an incandescent first night behind her and a big knot of socialite boxholders, Conductor Sundstrom may well work through her first deficitless season this year. If not, beauteous Mrs. Edward Morris, who buys a block of tickets for her household, a box for herself and her ex-packer husband, is expected to pay the bill.

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