The Moderns on Parade

American composers have never been so busy. The Louisville Orchestra and the Boston Symphony between them are lavishly commissioning new works. Latest patron: Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a "Festival of American Music." This month and in April Juilliard will perform 35 brand-new compositions, all but three of them commissioned by the school. The festival, says Juilliard's President William Schuman, "reaffirms [the school's] sense of responsibility toward the music of its own time." Last week the festival opened in Juilliard's University Heights auditorium, 65 blocks north of Carnegie Hall; the concert suggested nevertheless that modern American music is no longer as out-of-the-way as it used to be.

Led with precision and enthusiasm by Conductor Jean Morel, the Juilliard student orchestra began with an eclectic taradiddle called a "Preamble" by Manhattan Composer Bernard Wagenaar, then settled down to serious business: Composer Roger Sessions' Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra. It was the second Sessions premiere in four weeks (TIME, Jan. 30), with a symphony and a Mass still to come this spring. Played brilliantly by Pianist Beveridge Webster, the score, to tradition-attuned listeners, was like being sprayed with salvos of molten metal and broken glass. But the salvos were always tightly under control, and the fragments landed in a precise, intricate pattern. The concerto moved in a strong, surging series of climaxes, without concession to showiness or chic. For all its uncompromising musical headwork, Sessions' concerto had a lyric calm that pervaded even the lightning shifts and stabbings of the fast passages.

Third composition on the program was Peter Mennin's Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra, which made fewer demands on the listener, and showed less originality and toughness. It provided a neoromantic contrast to Sessions, and for long stretches sounded as if it might have been titled "Mr. Brahms Goes to Juilliard." Composer Mennin, who has six performed symphonies to his credit, kept the orchestra mostly under wraps to make his concerto one long melodious song for Leonard Rose's fluent cello.

Future names on the festival program furnish a virtual Who's Who in American Music, including Composers Walter Piston and Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Paul Creston, Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, Norman Dello Joio.

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