About 300,000 people a summer go to the Hollywood Bowl to hear a series of concerts pretentiously labeled "Symphonies Under the Stars." The current season began last fortnight, but one night last week the dither of arriving celebrities, the pop of exploding flashlights made it seem like an opening. Though Hollywood stars regularly attend the Bowl concerts, only a special occasion could have brought so many notables. Conductor Werner Janssen, son of the Manhattan restaurateur ("Janssen Wants to See You"), was playing a program by Finnish Jan Sibelius, the composer he understands best. He was playing for the first time at the Hollywood Bowl, the first time in the U. S. this year.
Listeners at Hollywood Bowl concerts last week had only to turn their eyes to a hillside 1,000 feet away to see scenes from the life and passion of Christ, enacted for the 15th consecutive season by the Pilgrimage Players whose audience in turn could dimly hear the Bowl concert. Most conspicuously attentive of the Bowl audience was Actress Ann Harding who from her seat up front never took her eyes off the lank, gloomy-looking young man who conducted all five scores from memory. When, at the end of Scenes Historiques, the audience called Janssen back nine times, she looked as pleased as he. Since the two were married in a London registrar's office (TIME, Jan. 25) they have been inseparable. Miss Harding broke her hit engagement in Candida to go honeymooning around Scandinavia. They stopped off in Helsingfors and Janssen played his sixth Sibelius concert there since 1934. Old Sibelius again attended, again declared that Janssen was his most gifted interpreter. The packed house cheered and cheered. Finns decked the Janssen car with flowers.
New York critics have never been so appreciative of Werner Janssen's gifts. Though he is an earnest student, a meticulous conductor with a clean, unmannered beat, they find him immature, often maladroit in sustaining long passages, often given to inexplicable changes of pace. But Hollywood had little doubt of Janssen's worth. At the end of the concert they stood and applauded for seven minutes. Conductor Otto Klemperer said he was "overwhelmed." Forty-two hostesses invited him to their parties as guest of honor.