Dutch Treat

Backstage at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall last week, 101 musicians in evening clothes puffed nervously at their cigarettes and filled the air with the Dutch language. They were the famed Amsterdam Concertgebouw (almost rhymes with dessert-'n'-how) Orchestra, launching their first U.S. tour. The thought of being in Carnegie Hall, where most of the world's finest orchestras have been heard, awed many of the players. They need not have worried. From the moment Conductor Eduard van Beinum quieted the rustling audience with a masterful glance, it was apparent this would be a concert to remember.

In the tricky first bars of Weber's Der Freischiitz overture, the French horns were as rich as a Rembrandt painting, and the big string section gave off an aura as warm as the old rose of the eleven cellos. The Concertgebouw made less noise than the best U.S. orchestras, and its climaxes were never ear-piercing. Rather, it seemed to inhale smoothly, reach its peaks easily, then relax with a sigh instead of an exhausted gasp.

With understandable pride, the orchestra played a modern Dutch composition, Henk Badings' Symphony No. 2 (1932), a sturdy work that might have been written by a latter-day Brahms, its three movements definitely dissonant but never harsh. High point of the concert was Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2, in which the strings provided a deep, sunset-colored perspective for the shrill syrinx tones of the piccolo, and the brasses built easily to a sweeping culmination. There were subtle orchestral colors that listeners had never heard before, but for all the music's impressionist vagueness, it never seemed cloudy. The concert ended with a performance of Brahms's First Symphony, so magnificently traditional that the composer might have applauded it as enthusiastically as the Carnegie audience did. On its U.S. tour, the Concertgebouw will be led only part of the time by Conductor van Beinum, who succeeded the late Willem Mengelberg as its head in 1946. Half the concerts will be led by Czech-born Rafael Kubelik, 40, who conducted the Chicago Symphony for three stormy years and next fall will become musical director of London's Covent Garden Opera. Before the Concertgebouw leaves for home on Dec. 4, it will play such major U.S. cities as Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.