Music: Strictly for Pleasure

Testy old (71) Sir Thomas Beecham was in a mellow mood. With the 105 members of his Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, he had cleared the brambles of the U.S.’s new Security Act without a scratch, while German and Italian musicians were having a time of it. (Said Sir Thomas blandly: “We’re all British, thank God.”) There was a deeper reason for his satisfaction: he was set to face U.S. audiences with an orchestra of his own—an enterprise “I have undertaken in a becoming spirit of modesty and humility.” In fact, beamed Sir Thomas, he had come “neither to educate nor to enlighten, but only to please.”

Conductor Beecham’s crooning modesty did not come from any qualms about the quality of his orchestra. As orchestras go, his Royal Philharmonic is almost brand-new (though the Royal Philharmonic Society, which sponsors it, can boast that it commissioned a tenth symphony from Beethoven, which he never lived to write). But Sir Thomas had painstakingly collected his orchestra himself after World War II—”because there was no existing British orchestra of a high enough standard to maintain my reputation.” After five years of drilling and polishing, he was confident that the Royal Philharmonic was one that he could be proud to stack against any in the world.

British Accent. Moving his musicians from city to city in three buses, Sir Thomas set out to please first in Hartford, Princeton, Pottsville, Pa., Washington and Boston. Last week he tackled Manhattan and a Carnegie Hall audience anxious to compare Britain’s finest with the U.S.’s top orchestras.

First, the audience got to its feet for a robust Star-Spangled Banner and a dignified God Save the King. Then, for two hours, the music lovers watched Sir Thomas, one of the most graphic conductors of them all, play his perfectly disciplined orchestra like an organ. They heard great music played to the hilt with an unmistakably British accent.

Gold in the Garden. In Berlioz’ overture Le Corsair, they heard all the noise that Berlioz’ bounding score calls for, and marveled at the expertly modulated brasses, blended and balanced instead of blaring. In Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, a Beecham specialty, the strings were firmer and not quite so luscious as U.S. strings, not so dry and nasal as the French. The woodwinds, clearly articulate, played with a tone of pure gold. It was a glossily polished performance—for some a disappointment because of its fussiness. But all in all, through Sibelius’ tone poem Tapiola, a Beethoven Eighth Symphony laid out with the precision and charm of an English garden, and a final lurid “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Richard Strauss’s Salome, the audience heard distinctively clean-clipped accents and gorgeous sonorities unmarred by a single ugly sound.

Before the Royal Philharmonic sails back to London in seven weeks, 32 other U.S. cities will hear it too.