Chamber music is caviar to musical gourmets. Caviar from the very finest of sturgeons is the chamber music produced by the famed Budapest String Quartet, world's top-ranking string ensemble. To gobble up this treat last fortnight Manhattan's hungriest musical highbrows gathered in Town Hall to hear the first concert of the New Friends of Music's annual chamber-music series.
For the occasion the Budapesters had with them two guest soloists: athletic William Primrose, world's No. 1 viola player and chief violist of Arturo Toscanini's NBC Orchestra; a small, plump, snub-nosed young woman who booped mightily through the brass coils of a big French horn. When she had finished the horn part of Mozart's Quintet in E Flat Major, with dignity she dumped the saliva from her horn, rose and went home to practice for this week's concert. The young woman's name was Ellen Stone, and playing with such topnotchers as the Budapest Quartet bothered her no whit, for she is the best woman French horn player in the world.
The French horn (musicians call it simply the "horn") is far & away the hardest of all brass instruments to play. Horn-blowers must have sensitive lips as well as stout lungs. Ellen Stone first tried her lips and lungs on a French horn six years ago, in the Teaneck, N. J. high-school band, when she was 16. Says she: "After three days I wouldn't have given it up for worlds. I felt comfortable on it." By now she sounds comfortable on it, but it took some doing. She practiced from morning to night—in the garage whither her distracted family banished her. Three years later she got a scholarship from Manhattan's Philharmonic-Symphony Society. One year after that famed Conductor Otto Klemperer heard her play, and hired her to solo with the newly formed Pittsburgh Symphony.
Today, 22-year-old, dark-haired Ellen Stone lives with her horn in a little bare-floored room off Manhattan's musical 57th Street. For amusement she goes to the movies, reads "great sociological novels like The Grapes of Wrath." But her big thrills come when her boy friends (mostly fellow horn players) ask her out for an evening of horn duets and trios. Her hero: sober, 180-lb., 52-year-old Bruno Jaenicke, world's champion horn player, who beeps and purls in John Barbirolli's New York Philharmonic-Symphony.