Concert in East Garden Court

In its paintings, Washington's National Gallery of Art pays more heed to the old world than to the new: more Titians than Trumbulls hang in its marbled halls. Musically, almost the reverse has been true since a tall, dark-haired young (34) conductor named Richard Bales took over the free gallery concerts six years ago. Bach and Beethoven are heard --but so are dozens of aspiring U.S. composers who seldom, if ever, get a hearing in Constitution or Carnegie halls.

Last week, music-lovers drifted leisurely through the dark green marble-pillared rotunda toward the glass-ceilinged East Garden Court for the fifth and final concert of Dick Bales's annual American Music Festival.

By 8 p.m., early comers had grabbed most of the folding chairs; late arrivals sat on the step around the pink-peony-decked center fountain. By the time energetic Conductor Bales had started to whip his 30 musicians through the first number, the hall was packed.

Some of the music by Americans, like Frederick Woltmann's Songs from a Chinese Lute and Bainbridge Crist's Oriental Nocturne, sounded fine but had little to do with America. But Robert Ward's Gershwinesque, midnight-blue Night Music and Ray Green's jiggy, jazzy, folk-flavored Three Pieces for a Concert were true Americana. Most impressive was Bales's own Episodes from a Lincoln Ballet, a dramatic descriptive work which carried Lincoln through his "Youth and Dreams," to "The Presidency" and "Fame Everlasting."

From the time he heard his first concert in Philadelphia at the age of twelve, Virginian Dick Bales knew he wanted to be a conductor. After high school he went to Rochester's Eastman School of Music. In 1940, after he had toured with a WPA orchestra and studied on a Juilliard fellowship, Serge Koussevitzky picked him as one of five outstanding young U.S. conductors, packed him off to the new Berkshire Music Center for private instruction.

Since he has been conducting in Washington, Dick Bales's record for doing right by U.S. composers is rivaled only by his famous teacher, the Eastman School's Howard Hanson, and by the annual Columbia University festival. In all, Bales has given Washington some 500 American-composed works and the premieres of about 50.

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