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Arturo Toscanini, famed Italian now functioning as guest leader of the New York Philharmonic, conducted his third program in Carnegie Hall, honored Vivaldi, Beethoven, De Sabata, and Stravinsky with his reading of their works. De Sabata, an Italian "modern," was represented by "Gethsemane," a symphonic poem, vague, impressionistic—night in a lonely garden, a stern voice breaking through the darkness to speak the awful law of redemption through renunciation; dawn, stillness, prayer; carefully explained but shallow, unoriginal music for which even the philanthropic genius of a Toscanini could not achieve distinction. But a great public on its knees to a great conductor forgave him for playing it, lavished him with applause, drew rapture from the Vivaldi, from the Beethoven.
Walter Damrosch, dean of conductors, appeared for the last time this season as leader of the New York Symphony at the fourth concert for young people. Genial, loquacious, he said good-by to his audience, told its members that when they were still freezing in New York he would be wearing the whitest of flannels in Sicily.
Again, Tibbett
At the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan, Lawrence Tibbett, young U. S. baritone who won fame overnight last year in a performance of Falstaff, succeeded Titta Ruffo as Neri in La Cena delle Beffe, again took high honors. Sophisticates who had gone expecting to hear Giordano's glittering, theatrical music sung by beautiful voices, to see unauthentic, bombastic acting, stayed after the performance to call "Tibbett! Tibbett!" and went home comparing favorably his performance with that of Lionel Barrymore in Benelli's stage version of The Jest.
"Deep River"
When A Light from St. Agnes, jazz opera, was produced in Chicago (TIME, Jan. 4), a number of ordinarily well-controlled gentlemen fell upon W. Franke Harling, the composer, as he was leaving the opera house and showered him with hugs and kisses. Composer Harling declared, in a trembling speech, that he was astounded. Nothing like that, he said, had ever happened to him—not even when he was writing cabaret revues in New York. But this incident and the opera—an amiable work, catchy, shrewd, imitative—brought him to the attention of Arthur Hopkins, famed theatrical manager. Mr. Hopkins has never yet produced a musical piece, but he stated four years ago that when the time was ripe he would present "an American opera along new lines." Last week he decided that the hour had come. He summoned to him Composer Harling and Lawrence Stallings, one-legged author of What Price Glory (drama), The Big Parade (cinema). To them he entrusted the composition of this long awaited opera, for which Mr. Stallings will write the script and Mr. Harling the score. The scene will be in Louisiana; the time 1830; negro spirituals will be used as motifs; the title will be Deep River.
Notes
Florence Mills, pastel darktown strutter, made a very serious concert bow last week before the International Composers' Guild, Manhattan, Eugene Goossens and Ottorino Respighi conducting; Mme. Respighi, soloist, and Alfredo Casella, pianist. Thin, glittering, syncopation in her eye, she sang four songs with a small jazz orchestra—"Levee Land" it was called, by William Still.