Music: Symphony Season

His iron-grey hair flying, his firm jaws clenched, Conductor Artur Rodzinski mounted a podium in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center one day last week, and with a brisk downbeat of his baton started a new orchestra through its paces. He soon exclaimed: “Marvelous! The strings are fantastically fine. … I doubt if there has ever been assembled anywhere, at any time, a new orchestra that promises so much for the future.”

The new orchestra had 92 members, some of them seasoned players in National Broadcasting Co. orchestras, others newly hired from symphonies all over the world. Titled the NBC Symphony Orchestra, it was especially assembled to play under Arturo Toscanini when that exacting little maestro arrives in the U. S. in December, to fulfill the contract he signed with NBC last winter (TIME, Feb. 15). For the ten concerts he will conduct on Saturday nights (10 to 11:30 E. S. T. on both NBC networks), Toscanini will receive $40,000 plus his passage and U. S. income taxes.

First permanent U. S. symphony to be maintained the year around by a broadcasting company. NBC’s orchestra will be drilled for the next month by Rodzinski, commuting between Manhattan and Cleveland, where this week he opens the 20th season of the Cleveland Orchestra.Rodzinski and Pierre Monteux will conduct three NBC concerts apiece before Toscanini’s arrival. The 92 men of the orchestra were chosen from among 700 applicants, to the concern of at least one orchestra—the Detroit Symphony, which is losing five men to NBC.

Concertmaster, that necessarily capable violinist who sits near the conductor, acts as his working assistant, is Mischa Mischakoff, onetime concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony, founder of a string quartet which for twelve years bore his name, owner of a $50,000 Stradivarius. The rest of the orchestra is well up to his high par.

To put its orchestra on the air and pay its conductors for the season and its men for the year will cost NBC something more than $600,000. How great its audience will be is anyone’s guess. NBC’s estimate, probably high, is that 33,000,000 people listen to its Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. This season, radio’s offerings of good music will tend to pile up over week ends, with the Opera on Saturday afternoon, the NBC Symphony Saturday night, Columbia Broadcasting System’s New York Philharmonic Symphony (opening this week under Conductor John Barbirolli) on Sunday afternoon, and in the evening two motor advertising programs. The Ford Hour, with the Detroit Symphony, led off last month with hard-working Jose Iturbi, first of a series of guest conductors. The General Motors Hour, to avoid duplicating Ford’s soloists as it did last year, has hired a troupe of eight singers—Sopranos Grace Moore, Maria Jeritza. Helen Jepson. Erna Sack (a coloratura from Dresden), Tenors Richard Tauber, Joseph Schmidt, Jussi Bjoerling (a much-touted newcomer from Stockholm), Baritone Donald Dickson. Such week-end fare some radio listeners profess to believe they will find tiring to keep up with, and some managers of U. S. orchestras which play on Saturday nights were claiming last week that competition from Toscanini will be more than they can stand. One orchestra which has no such worries is the Standard Symphony of Standard Oil Co. of California, now playing Thursdays, which last week celebrated its tenth anniversary on the Air, played its 520th concert, under Alfred Hertz.

The 13 biggest U. S. symphony orchestras operated last year on budgets totaling $4,346,500, ran up deficits amounting to $1,564,400. Some 3,500,000 people heard their 1,100 men give 1,200 concerts. These, and dozens of smaller orchestras, looked forward last week to the best season, financially, of recent years. As a yardstick, the concert season was booming, Columbia Concerts Corp. declaring that its mid-September bookings were nearly 50% above the year before, and NBC Artists Service claiming that its 102 artists would gross $1,200,000 this year, or 20% more than last.

The bullish orchestra season began in Philadelphia, where Eugene Ormandy raised his hands, baton-less like Stokowski for the first time, over the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Academy of Music. The orchestra lost money on its post-season tour last spring, but made its first net profit—$5,000 on $650,000 business— since 1929. It will continue this season to play Monday nights on the radio for principal U. S. banks. In Boston, where Sergei Koussevitzky opened in sold-out Symphony Hall, subscriptions were best since 1933. This week the Chicago Symphony opens under tenacious old Dr. Frederick Stock, 33 years on the podium; a rejuvenated Pittsburgh Symphony plays with hulking Dr. Otto Klemperer; the Kansas City Philharmonic enters its fifth season with a budget of $140,000 (its first was but $30,000); capable orchestras tune up in Duluth and Cincinnati. End of the month Washington hears the National Symphony under Dr. Hans Kindler; seasons open in Denver, Seattle and St. Louis; an Italian newcomer from La Scala in Milan, Franco Ghione, shares the Detroit podium with Victor Kolar;Minneapolis gets an able Greek, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and a Russian-Italian associate conductor. Daniel Amfitheatrof.