To Meet the Queen

When Conductor Eugene Ormandy first announced the trip to England, wise guys in his Philadelphia Orchestra cracked, "Oh yeah?" They had been hearing about such tours for years, and the trips never came off. No big U.S. orchestra had been to Europe since Arturo Toscanini toured with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony in 1930--and lost $250,000 doing it. Last week, to the wise guys' surprise, they were actually barnstorming through Britain.

Britain liked what it heard. Birmingham's packed-house response to the first of the Philadelphia's 28 British concerts was as good a prescription for ailing Conductor Ormandy as the half-pound of U.S. beef the doctor had ordered him to eat before each performance.

Beams & Bows. At the third concert of the tour, when the Philadelphia's pint-sized conductor strode toward the podium in London's huge Royal Albert Hall before a glittering audience of 7,000, he got only scant applause. Most were watching the royal box, where Queen Elizabeth was just making her own arrival. But an hour later, when Ormandy had brought Brahms's Symphony No. i to a resounding end, the applause came heavy and this time it was all for Ormandy and the orchestra. And when he finished the program with Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe, the white ties in the three-guinea stalls shouted bravos, while the galleries stomped and whistled. Ormandy beamed & bowed ten times, finally ended shouts of "Encore" by launching into God Save the King.* Then the musicians dashed off to a party at the U.S. embassy for a chance to meet the Queen.

Wrote Violinist Schima Kaufman, doubling as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer: "The hard-boiled orchestra members, who have played for every sort of celebrity from Presidents down, melted at her graciousness."

Bouquets & Brickbats. Not so melted were London critics. The Manchester Guardian and London Daily Telegraph were unstinting in their praise. But the Times had a brickbat in its bouquet: "The virtuosity of the execution is astonishing. But equally . . . astonishing was the lack of [interpretive] imagination . . . Brahms's First Symphony opened with an assertion of fact, not the declaration of a mystery . . . Brahms might have written the symphony for a motion picture." Even so, on second thought, the Times admitted English orchestras suffered by comparison.

The popular London press was more intrigued with money matters. Headlined the Daily Mirror: WORLD'S GREATEST ORCHESTRA IS HERE--MUST IT BE A FLOP?

That was a fair question. The box-office future had looked dark, but slashing ticket prices up to 50% had brightened things considerably. Conductor Ormandy was not worried: the tour, and the Philadelphia's nearly $16,000-a-week payroll (duly noted by the London press) was guaranteed. Hardly worried. either was the guarantor--handsome, 31-year-old British Impresario Harold Fielding, who stood to make up in publicity and prestige what he would shell out of his pocket. Moreover, on a turnabout's-fair-play basis, U.S. Music Czar James Caesar Petrillo would welcome British orchestras to tour the U.S.

*Said Lord Beaverbrook's astonished Evening Standard: "Here at last is a foreign orchestra that can play God Save the King, although nearly two centuries have passed since it ceased to be the American anthem."

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