The Philharmonic's Quiet Summer

In the Carnegie Hall bar and Joe Romano's Restaurant around the corner, many an oldtimer with a battered fiddle case shook his head sadly over his beer. Summer was over for the Philharmonic orchestra; it had been about as quiet as a monsoon. The open-air season at Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium had piled up the largest deficit in the orchestra's 25-year history, most of which is written in red ink. Dimmed out as an air-raid precaution, the outdoor stadium had been plagued nightly by the whir of airplane motors. A bolt of lightning had demolished the sound shell on the stadium stage. The final concert had ended in a steady drizzle of rain, with seven violinists sadly sticking to their posts and moistly fiddling Auld Lang Syne. There was not a dry aisle in the amphitheater.

No sooner had the stadium season reached this amphibious end than General Manager Arthur Judson announced a shake-up among the Philharmonic's most important and highest-paid wind players. Trumpeter Harry Glantz, U.S. champion in his class, was promptly snapped up by the rival NBC Orchestra. Massive Flutist John Amans, famed for his ability to make his tootling instrument boom like a church organ, was retired, replaced by the NBC Orchestra's Pennsylvania-born John Wummer. World's champion French Horn Player Bruno Jaenicke, suffering from a heart ailment, prepared to spend the rest of his career sitting on the sidelines while a younger man, Rudolph Puletz Jr., did most of his puffing for him.

Most radical change in the Philharmonic's ranks, the engagement of a new first trombonist named William Jack Satterfield, caused heated comment not only among Carnegie Hall's long hairs but throughout the music marts of Broadway's dance-band industry. No highbrow, Trombonist Satterfield, son of a West-Virginia farmer, is famed, not for symphonic and operatic tromboning, but for his hot riffs as a member of Raymond Paige's "Young Americans" and several well-known U.S. dance bands. Never before (except in the case of one obscure drum & cymbal player) had the august Philharmonic unbent its classical dignity so far as to hire a former U.S. jazz artist.

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