It is not often that you see motor after motor full of fine ladies and smart gentlemen rolling up in front of the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C. But last week you saw them. It continued for three days. One day they rolled up twice.
If you followed these unusual visitors, you soon found out that they had not come to borrow books from the U. S. A. They passed to an inner court of the great building and entered, through a door cut through the library walls, a chaste little temple of white marble that has been completed for something over a year. They removed their wraps, settled themselves in comfortable, well-spaced seats and listened, not to a Senatorial diatribe, but to some of the purest chamber music that is to be heard anywhere in the world. It was music under the auspices of the Librarian of Congress and his musical assistants; and thus actually under the auspices of the U. S. It was the second of an annual festival begun last year. The name of the festival, however, is not "All-American" or "Bigger and Better Music Week," as one might suspect, but the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Festival, so-called for accuracy's sake after the extraordinary lady who built the marble temple, provided for its maintenance, inveigled Congress into accepting it as a gift to the nation, and who personally arranges the programs, invites the artists and pays them.
Conductor Ernest Bloch came all the way from San Francisco to lead a picked handful of men with strings through Bach's steamy and impetuous "Brandenburg" concerto in G. Some of the temperament of this first performance extended, unhappily, into their execution of the next item, Mozart's lunar "Serenata Notturna," but was in place again for Mr. Bloch's own sombre, splendid composition, "Concerto Grosso."
The next morning's gathering heard Mrs. Coolidge's latest European importation, the fiery Pro Arte Quartet of Brussels—"young lions of the conservatoire," one and all. With much gusto two of these attacked a most modern sonata, compounded of unconvincing fifths, dissonances and Debussyesque decoration, with which Albert Huybrechts, young Belgian, had won the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Prize for 1926.* Compositions by. other Belgians—rich, sensuous Cesar Franck and trickier Joseph Jongen, little-known chief of the Brussels Conservatory. The afternoon was devoted to Russians, with the Stringwood Ensemble of New York at the desks. Many a 100% Congressman might have glowered had he known that the group of Russian peasant songs sung by Baritone Boris Saslavsky was arranged by one A. F. Goedike at the express command of the Soviet Government.
The closing program was entrusted to the faultless Flonzaley Quartet, who played Haydn, Balmer, Schumann.