Schuman, No Kin

The contest, held by a musicians' committee "to aid Spanish democracy," was over. The prize had gone to a young, unknown composer, William Schuman, for his Second Symphony. But the promised publication and performance never materialized. One of the sympathetic judges, genial, large-nosed Composer Aaron Copland, sent Schuman a post card, "Why don't you send your score to Serge Koussevitzky?" He did, and within a week got a letter from Koussevitzky asking for the parts. A performance followed that fall. Since then Koussevitzky has championed William Schuman's music. The Boston Symphony introduced his Third Symphony last October. The Clevelanders gave his Fourth its premiere in January. When the Fourth reached Manhattan last week, Musicritic Virgil Thomson found in it "an agreeable kind of boisterousness . . . that should be fun to dance to."

No kin to the great German romanticist, Robert Schuman, Composer William Schuman is a forthright Manhattan-born Yankee. Son of a lithographer, he started his career as a Tin-Pan Alley composer, collaborating with Frank Loesser in such gems as In Love With the Memory of You. Now he teaches composition and leads the chorus at Sarah Lawrence College.

Most-played of his orchestral works is the American Festival Overture, written for Koussevitzky in 1939, and based on a boys' street call "wee-awk-ee" (meaning "c'mon over"). This month the Overture is out on a record (National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hans Kindler; Victor). The first major example of Schuman's music on disks, it is a lusty, cleanly written, skin-deep score. No atonalist, William Schuman composes with independent spirit, says of his music, "For better or worse, it sounds the way I want it to."

Other symphonic records of the month:

Brahms: Symphony No. 2 (London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Felix Weingartner; Columbia; 10 sides). Brahms's soaring architecture traced with unerring mastery by the famed conductor, who is now the first to have recorded all the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies.

Vivaldi: Concerto Grosso in D Minor (Boston Symphony conducted by Serge Koussevitzky ; Victor; 3 sides). Eleventh, and most familiar, of the dozen "harmonious raptures" of the red-bearded Venetian priest whose music Bach so often transcribed, recorded (before Boss Petrillo's ban) by the Boston Symphony's matchless strings, with some woodwind help.

Brahms: Trio No. 1 , in B Major (Artur Rubinstein, piano; Jascha Heifetz, violin; Emanuel Feuermann, cello; Victor; 8 sides). Three great artists, tops in their fields, submerged their prima donna instincts late last summer in Victor's Hollywood studios to breathe rich new life into an old trio.

Kern: Show Boat: Scenario for Orchestra (Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski; Columbia; 6 sides). The Show Boat tunes, some of the bravest in U.S. operetta, were dressed up last year by their composer in symphonic finery at the persuasion of Conductor Rodzinski. The resulting potpourri is lush, places Jerome Kern no whit nearer Beethoven as a symphonist, but Rodzinski's silky performance makes even more apparent Kern's Schubertian gift for melody.

Songs of Vienna (Lotte Lehmann, soprano; Columbia; 6 sides). Mistress of lieder, opera star, novelist. Lotte Lehmann shows another facet of her versatile genius in her intimate, heartfelt singing of these light nostalgic songs of Europe's onetime musical capital.

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