ForF.D.R.

The new symphony was dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man of catholic tastes--though his musical likes ran to plainer fare like Home on the Range. The premiere last week in San Francisco of Roger Sessions' Symphony No. 2 was hard work for musicians and audience alike.

Conductor Pierre Monteux, who had put the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra through seven rehearsals of it, scowled at the notes through his silver-rimmed glasses. After working their way through tricky phrases, the violinists looked as if they had been slapped in the face by the score. The audience, which took it tensely but manfully, seemed grateful for Tchaikovsky's threadbare Piano Concerto No. 1, which followed.

Roger Sessions' music is for composers and critics, not for mere listeners. Next day the audience was told what it had heard. The San Francisco Chronicle's able critic Alfred Frankenstein, called it "big . . . challenging . . . important . . . austere . . . fiendishly difficult ... a complex of forceful and fruitful ideas which can be studied for a long time before they yield all their secrets."

A musician's musician, Roger Sessions looks like a swarthy, extremely precocious baby; he is probably the most difficult of U.S. composers. His 12-year-old violin concerto bogged down all but one of the many violinists who tackled it. His orchestral works are as elaborately scored as those of Hector Berlioz, but, unlike Berlioz, Sessions seldom repeats themes to give listeners something to cling to. The new symphony's unmuted brasses were as noisy as Shostakovich's, and some passages reminded hearers of the atonalist music of Hindemith and Schonberg. Sessions, however, believes that he is closer to Hungary's late, great Bela Bartok. And he hates to be called atonal: "I hear my music with the same kind of ear I use to listen to Beethoven."

On Brooklyn's Washington Avenue, where Roger Sessions was born 50 years ago, Aaron Copland was born four years later. In 1928 the two composers sponsored a Copland-Sessions concert series for contemporary music. During the past two years, Sessions has taught composition at the University of California along with his onetime teacher, Composer Ernest Bloch, and often visits France's Darius Milhaud, who teaches at nearby Mills College. In this stimulating atmosphere he has half-finished a third symphony and has begun a four-act opera called Montezuma. He started the Roosevelt symphony in 1944 at Princeton, was on the third movement (adagio) when Roosevelt died. After listening to Monteux play it, Sessions said: "It hit me with a bang. I think it the most important work I've done."

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