Music: In Manhattan

Winter 1933. Ninety musicians, having long since decided that they had only themselves, their fiddles and horns to help them through Depression, observed that they had given several concerts without much of any notice, that they were as likely to starve as ever, and that what they had better do was beg. So they begged Nikolai Sokoloff to take charge of them. This he was well able to do since he was about to become unemployed as a result of disagreements among the big hackers of the Cleveland Orchestra which he alone had conducted for 15 years.*

Summer 1933. The culture resident in Southeastern Connecticut traveled several times by automobile to Nikolai Sokoloff's farm in Weston, Conn., where a hillside was accepted as an amphitheatre and the 90 musicians as an orchestra.

Last week. Some 2,000 New Yorkers went to Carnegie Hall to hear the 90 musicians play. They were not concerned with the players' financial struggle. And to them it was irrelevant that the conductor they were about to watch was putting to the hazard a reputation which had splendidly justified his poor immigrant Russian parents, years ago, in letting him be adopted by a New Haven spinster, Miss Charlotte Ingersoll, so that he could have training. What the Carnegie Hall crowd wanted to find out was whether there could be such a thing as a real bargain in symphonies. And when they filed out two hours later they had been convinced that there, could be. Seats had cost as little as 40¢, no more than $2. The men had played smoothly, exactly. The pro gram had been substantial, wellrounded. True to Sokoloff's principle a new composer had been given a hearing (see below).

Sokoloff had been right on another score: He had found a symphonic public in New York without appealing to Philharmonic subscribers. And though he does not hope to rival the Philharmonic, a New York reputation is the first step in the fulfillment of his big idea: To supply finest orchestral music to the many big-little Eastern cities which cannot afford to pay for high-priced orchestras like the Philharmonic or the Boston. Last week the New York reputation seemed assured and the New York Orchestra began to justify its name.

In Kansas City

Karl Krueger, late of the Seattle Symphony, and Nikolai Sokoloff (see above) have two qualities in common. They both know how to whip a ragged orchestra into shape, how to gamble on their caché. Conductor Krueger last week conducted the inaugural concert of the Kansas City Philharmonic, a pay-as-it-goes enterprise boosted by the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce. Kansas City's last symphonic venture (two concerts by the Kansas City Musicians Association) was sponsored by Conrad Henry Mann shortly before he was indicted under the Federal lottery law. Before that the Chamber's favorite was Soprano Marion Talley, a local telegrapher's daughter whose career Storeman Seigmund Harzfeld helped to finance. This year's music chief is doughty Powell Campbell Groner, president of Kansas City Public Service Co. Burned though he was from going to sleep under an ultraviolet lamp, he appeared last week in Convention Hall to introduce the orchestra which the Kansas City Times headlined as a "triumph in music."

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