Music: Businessmen’s Orchestra

A butcher who handled a bull-fiddle as familiarly as if it were one of the big carcasses hanging in his refrigerator, a Sears, Roebuck accountant who plays the viola, a postman who is also a flutist, and 100 other double-lived Chicago businessmen hurried from their workaday jobs early one night last week, dressed themselves in freshly-pressed business suits and set out for Orchestra Hall to demonstrate how well a band of earnest, carefully-rehearsed amateurs could play.

John Ruef, a salesman for Peoples Gas Light & Coke Co., sounded an A on his oboe. During the noisy tuning up several of the amateurs nervously knocked the music off their racks. But once under way they traversed bravely the technical difficulties of a Bach Chorale and Fugue, of Brahms’s great Fourth Symphony. Violinist Amy Neill, wife of Lawyer Avern Scolnik who fiddled in the orchestra, soloed so expertly that critics complained sincerely about her playing so seldom in public. Wives and families of the players applauded so persistently that portly Conductor Clarence Evans got some real exercise bowing. But in all Orchestra Hall that evening there was none so proud as brawny, bald George Lytton who sat well back in the orchestra, hugging a bull-fiddle near Butcher Hugo Haberland.

Big George Lytton came forward just once, to hand over the concert’s proceeds to Pianist Rudolph Ganz, president of the Bohemian Club which is concentrating this year on helping indigent musicians. Everyone in the audience knew that the modest contra-bassist was the founder of the Chicago Businessmen’s Orchestra, that for eleven years he had borne the brunt of its expenses, given it a place to rehearse in his big Hub Store. Boxing, not music, was George Lytton’s hobby when he first joined his father in the men’s clothing business. He used to be regarded as amateur heavyweight champion, fought in his youth against Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, Jack Johnson. He kept punching bags and skipping ropes in his office where now he has double-basses and oboes (his collection includes 28 big fiddles) which he lends to his fellow amateurs.

On Friday nights throughout the winter the Orchestra congregates in the Hub Store fitting-room. Conductor Evans, a Chicago Symphony viola player, is the only paid professional in the lot. The concertmaster is Sidney James, a handsome, white-haired chemical engineer. One of the ‘cellists is a brain-specialist— Dr. Adrien Henri Pierre EugeneVerbrugghen, son of Belgian Henri Verbrugghen who used to conduct the Minneapolis Symphony.

Four years ago Los Angeles followed Chicago’s lead, started a Businessmen’s Orchestra under L. M. Bardet, a grain & feed man. Akron. Ohio, has an orchestra composed of doctors and dentists, organized so efficiently that when its members are called out on emergency cases there are alternate players ready to take their places.