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George Eastman, the late camera tycoon, gave Howard Hanson his golden chance. He made him director of the richly-endowed Eastman School of Music it Rochester, a post for which Hanson has shown his gratitude by putting on annual spring festivals of music by U. S. composers hard put to get a hearing elsewhere (TIME, May 16). In Rochester Composer Hanson has worked hard. No detail at the Eastman School is too humdrum to receive his attention. He frequently conducts his adoring Eastman students, screwing up his long face, vigorously beating time with his long, flyaway arms.
Eastman students packed Kilbourn Hall this winter when Composer Hanson broadcast from Europe with Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra. In his naïve, unaffected way he sent his greetings that night to his father and mother who keep house for him in Rochester. Of all Hanson's music Rochester likes best the rugged Lament for Beowulf, a choral work which holds out greater hopes for Merry Mount, the opera the Metropolitan has accepted, than does the pleasant Romantic Symphony. Toscanini did not choose to play the Romantic Symphony on his visits to Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore this week —the last out-of-town concerts the Philharmonic feels it can afford.
*His friend Ernest Schelling was one. In addition to Hanson, the others were Wagenaar (Symphony No. 2) and Chasins (Impressions in a Chinese Garden and Parade).