San Francisco Cheers

"This is the most exciting thing that's happened since the opera house was built," said the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra's manager. The woodwind players were stomping their feet, brass players were applauding; violinists rapped their bows on their music stands. The audience had started it by clapping spontaneously between movements, which simply isn't done ordinarily. Said one awed onlooker: "My God, some of the ladies are even taking their gloves off."

No one was quite sure what had set them off: the flashing performance of a violinist unknown to San Francisco audiences, Russian-born Tossy Spivakovsky, 37, or the wonders of the work he had just played, Bela Bartok's only concerto for violin.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Critic Alfred Frankenstein couldn't wait to get to his typewriter. After glowing words for Violinist Spivakovsky,* Frankenstein wrote: "This is conceivably the greatest violin concerto since Brahms . . . noble, rich and splendid . . . blazing display music for [a] soloist to conquer. . . ."

A Beat Behind. San Francisco was only a beat behind in belatedly discovering the greatness of Bela Bartok's music (TIME, March 18, 1946). Most listeners had stumbled on Bartok's harsh, stubborn harmonies, his jagged rhythms, and never got through to the original and melodic genius that audiences and critics were now beginning to find in his music. Not until a year after his death in 1945 did audiences get to hear much of his music, and to convince themselves that they liked it. Big record companies rushed his last great compositions onto wax: Columbia, the Piano Concerto No. 3; Victor, the Violin Concerto. Neither has yet recorded what some admirers believe is the greatest work of them all: the Concerto for Orchestra.

Slight, soft-spoken Bela Bartok, who left fascist Hungary in 1940, had lived his last years in the U.S. and died broke and unrecognized (except by a few) in Manhattan. If his music was played at all in his lifetime, it was usually for one hearing only, or before tiny groups of enthusiasts. Few of his works had been recorded while he was alive, and they had not sold well. Rehearsal for Critics. On the same afternoon that San Franciscans were cheering the Bartok concerto, Yehudi Menuhin invited Manhattan critics to his Park Avenue apartment. Yehudi, dressed in a slack suit and bedroom slippers, wanted them to hear again a Bartok composition they had frowned on three years ago: a powerful sonata for unaccompanied violin which Bartok had written for Yehudi. Yehudi was going to play it again this week, and this time wanted the critics to be prepared. Bartok, hearing Yehudi play one of his compositions two years before he died, told him: "I thought works were only played that way long after the composers were dead."

* "At intermission there were only two questions that people asked each other--was this the best since the sensational debut of Heifetz 30 years ago, or was this just the best, period? You can answer either question in the affirmative so far as this department is concerned."

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