Music: Boston to Cork

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When American musicians fly to Europe, they usually touch down in Ireland as many tourists do, take on a few drams of Paddy's at Shannon and travel on. But when the Boston Symphony set up its five-week tour, it scheduled its first foreign concert in Cork (pop. 75,595).

The orchestra brought along one of its trustees, Boston Insurance Broker Michael T. Kelleher. Before the concert began last week in the 1,500-seat Savoy Theater, Mike Kelleher drew cheers when he spoke of his father who had emigrated to the U.S. from County Cork. Then the orchestra set its gesture to music, opened its program with U.S. Composer Leroy Anderson's Irish Suite, a collection of slick arrangements of Irish tunes.

The audience received this morsel with mixed feelings. Said one listener: "I would have preferred any overture to a selection of Irish airs which I already know by heart." Other program items: Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Brahms's Second Symphony. At the end, the orchestra and Conductor Charles Munch (whose wife had died in Paris three days before) received a ten-minute ovation. Next day, before a top-drawer audience in Dublin, the ovation was repeated. But the Irish Times critic was totally unmoved by the sentimentality of the occasion. "The orchestra is very accomplished," he wrote, after the Cork concert. "It plays with great precision and a fine, sensitive response to the conductor's expressive beat. The accomplishment, however, is mainly technical . . . The Sorcerer's Apprentice promised well, but soon fell into machined precision, like those great American cars which speed along comfortably."

This week the orchestra plays at the Edinburgh Festival, then moves toward Soviet territory for concerts in Czechoslovakia and Russia.