Music: Colored Christians

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The Jubilee Singers, on last appearance a sextet of Fisk graduates, disbanded recently. Because the University must raise $145,000 each year to keep going, Lawyer Cravath who as trustee chairman is carrying on his father's work, decided that the student choir should venture forth.

Cleveland's Change

A mighty, declamatory E flat chord which 90 musicians sounded in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall this week heralded a vital change for three U. S. orchestras. With Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, Conductor Nikolai Sokoloff was beginning his first concert with the New York Orchestra, a cooperative group of players who gave inexpensive concerts last summer in George Washington Stadium. Conductor Sokoloff's contract with the Cleveland Orchestra expires this spring. Several weeks ago it was announced that next season he would take over the cooperative players, tour with them to the small eastern cities which the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia and Boston Symphonies no longer feel financially able to visit, again strive to prove, as he did in Cleveland, his genius for building up an orchestra.

Coincidentally with the trial concert Sokoloff gave this week in Manhattan came word that Polish Artur Rodzinski would succeed him in Cleveland, word that was seriously foreboding for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In December Conductor Rodzinski made two appearances in Cleveland which were particularly pleasing to wealthy Dudley Stuart Blossom. But Conductor Rodzinski's contract had another year to run in Los Angeles where he is extremely popular. The fact that he was released to go to Cleveland seemed to confirm the rumor that William Andrews Clark Jr., for 13 years sole patron of the Philharmonic, is through spending on music the remains of the copper fortune left him by his father, the late Senator from Montana.

Wagner Recast

Critics who have let wistful memories of pre-War casts dominate their reviews of Manhattan's recent Wagnerian performances heard a Tristan and Isolde this week which sent them scurrying to their offices to set down extravagant superlatives. Soprano Frida Leider and Contralto Maria Olszewska, pick of the disbanded Chicago Civic Opera artists, had made débuts as Isolde and Brangaene. The Tristan was Lauritz Melchior who sings at the Metropolitan just often enough to remind people that there still is a great Wagnerian tenor. Conductor Artur Bodanzky had led the orchestra through the maze of Wagner's love music as if he too was aware that here was a performance long to be remembered.

Frida Leider, whose fame in Germany, London and Chicago preceded her, was the Isolde for whom the critics had been waiting. She sang the music easily, with magnificent, full tones, molding each phrase with hands as expressive as her voice. Her care for detail, her flawless results, made the story that she had spent four years perfecting a single phrase easy to believe. Germans who know her say that each of her Isoldes is smoothly, precisely the same, like the Isolde of great Lilli Lehmann who used to say that she had sung the rôle 300 and more times, had never seen reason to vary it. But when the curtain went down on Frida Leider's début performance this week 20 recalls kept the cleaning women late for their midnight jobs.