Concerto in Chinese

When China's No. 1 musician was nine years old, his parents decided that China had too little, musically, to offer him. They packed Ma Si-tson off to the Paris Conservatory. Nine years later he returned to China, to teach at Nanking, to organize Chungking's first symphony orchestra, and to become, in no time at all, China's best violinist.

During the war Ma escaped with his wife from Hong Kong to the village of Ping-shih, where he taught at the exiled Sun Yat-sen University, on a salary lower than that of a factory coolie. There he began to compose China's first concerto.

Last week Ma, now 33, heard the first performance of his Violin Concerto in F Major by the Shanghai Municipal Symphony Orchestra. The musicians, China's finest, were white Russians and Italian and German refugees who have grudgingly admitted only one Chinese as violinist. To Western ears, the concerto (based on South China folksongs) was easier to take than most Chinese music.

The audience applauded it generously, and even more generously applauded the soloist, a fact which Ma did not seem to mind. The violinist was Ma Sihon, his 22-year-old brother. Ma Si-tson's next project: The Inferno, a symphony which will depict "all the sadness . . . which happened in these war years."

* Copyright 1941, Robbins Music Corp.

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