Pianist Ethel Leginska has often disappointed her audiences by failure to appear. Ethel Leginska, as conductor, has always been at the appointed dais at the appointed time. Last week Conductor Leginska broke her record, failed her public. The San Carlo Grand Opera Company had announced that she would conduct the last Saturday matinee of its Manhattan engagement. But soon they bickered. Conductor Leginska wished to lead not one but four performances. The San Carlo rebelled—and at the scheduled Butterfly the audience watched the serviceable back of Carlo Peroni instead of the svelt velvet jacket and flyaway head of Leginska.
The afternoon was far from wasted, though, for the heroine was Hizi Koyke, a real Japanese. Exquisite, like a figure on a fan, she showed with the swaying of her body, the fluttering of her tiny hands a hundred little emotions beyond the reach of human voice. Three years ago she came to Manhattan, a child with a pretty little voice pinched into an Oriental mould. Edythe Magee took her in hand, grafted an Occidental instrument there, one almost as captivating as the girl herself.
A better showing was made earlier in the week by Emerson Whithorne, onetime (1907-09) husband of Conductor Leginska, whose New York Days and Nights had its first orchestral performance at the hands of the new Beethoven Symphony Orchestra. Critics liked his musical descriptions of a murky autumn morning on a ferry; of the chimes of St. Patrick blended with a Gregorian Chant; of Pell Street, Manhattan's Chinatown, and an old Chinaman playing on his single-stringed fiddle; of Greenwich Village and its weighty dramas made of little lives; of Times Square, its crowds, its glitter, its noise.