Music: Prodigious Cleveland

• Share

Orchestras, like women, aspire to homes of their own. The ambition, in the case of orchestras, is lofty. It assumes a financial well-being and general confidence which few orchestras ever attain, yet last week it was realized by the prodigious Cleveland Orchestra in its 13th year.

Materially the Cleveland Orchestra's new home is the work of Architects Walker & Weeks, who also designed Cleveland's Public Library, Medical Library, and Federal Reserve Bank. It is an imposing Indiana limestone structure, roughly triangular, with a vaulted polygonal front spreading fanwise to the rear. It is situated in Wade Park opposite the Art Museum on land donated by Western Reserve University. Besides the silver-grey modernistic auditorium which seats 1,900, there is a chamber music hall (capacity 400), a large broadcasting studio, an air-conditioning plant.

Intellectually the new building is a monument to the efforts and foresight of two people: to Russian Nikolai Sokoloff, only conductor the Orchestra has had, who at last week's dignified housewarming gave a particularly eloquent reading of Charles Martin Tornov Loeffler's Evocation, composed specially for the occasion; and to Adella Prentiss Hughes, the Orchestra's enterprising manager, out of respect for whom John Davison Rockefeller Jr., a one-time Clevelander, gave $250,000. Financially the rest of the credit goes to Dudley Stuart Blossom, tireless campaigner who with his wife gave some $900,000; and to President John Long Severance of the Musical Arts Association who gave $2,500,000 of his oil & steel fortune, and for whose wife, the late Elizabeth DeWitt Severance, the building has been called Severance Hall.

New Pianist

When a conductor with the reputation of Bernardino Molinari troubles to introduce a young pianist at a formal tea, when Arturo Toscanini lets it be known that he greatly admires him, the young pianist becomes a figure to be reckoned with. Twenty-six-year old Carlo Zecchi was the Italian so marked last week in Manhattan. He earned his honors with a fleet-fingered, high-strung performance of Liszt's E Flat Concerto with the Philharmonic-Symphony, then resumed a tour of some 35 concerts into the midwest.* Pianist Zecchi's friends say that he is a shy, serious young person who sometimes wishes he had gone in for political economy instead of music. His musical instincts developed first. At 12 he had written a martial chorus called New Italy, dedicated it to the Italian Crown Prince, conducted it at a concert which the Crown Prince attended. After conservatory training in Rome, he went to Berlin to study intensively under famed Ferrucio Busoni, developed German ideas and a love for Schumann and Bach. In Milan Toscanini heard him, rushed up to the platform after the performance and embraced him. In Soviet Russia, on which he is writing a book, and in South America he has made a big name.