Music: Creme de la Creme

As a businessman, soft-spoken Francis (“Hank”) Knight, 59, is first-class: he is a vice president of Chicago’s Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co. Musically, he admits that he is “a perpetual second fiddler.” But he loves music, and has been playing chamber music (violin) for 30 years. Other Chicago music lovers have reason to be grateful to busy Banker Knight: he has seen to it that at the end of each year’s Ravinia Park festival he gets the best of his favorite kind of music.

When Hank Knight first persuaded Ravinia’s reluctant executive committee to add a seventh week to the six-week season, they dubiously called it “crème de la crème.” The first concert, with the Pro Arte Quartet, drew only 559 fans, but even that was 200 more than they expected. Since then things have picked up. His biggest triumph came last year when he got Pianist Artur Rubinstein, Violinist Jascha Heifetz and Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky to play together, and packed Ravinia with a record-breaking 10,000 fans (TIME, Aug. 22, 1949).

This season, Knight roped in another star-studded cast for 1950’s “seventh week.” And he was even getting in a little second fiddling of his own. While his family sprawled on the living-room rug, he clamped a Stradivarius under his chin, launched into a Mozart quartet with three members of the famed Paganini Quartet. Grinned little First Violinist Henry Temianka: “He didn’t get lost once.” Said Second Fiddler Knight: “I only play with good musicians. Two punks would ruin the music.”

The Paganini players were only part of his cast. Last week thousands of Ravinia fans, sitting on blankets on the dimly floodlit grass, listened to Soprano Lotte Lehmann, whose lieder voice, beamed Knight, “is as near to chamber music as you can get—intimate, romantic.” And they heard Chilean Pianist Claudio Arrau playing Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, as a soloist and in ensemble with the Paganini.

As for Ravinia’s once skeptical executive committee, crème de la crème had become solid roast beef.