Music: Los Angeles March

Last week Los Angeles stole a march on other Far Western orchestras when it opened its Philharmonic season ahead of San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. Those cities were worrying about the abbreviated seasons they would begin in November when lights flashed on in the Los Angeles Auditorium and an eager crowd pushed its way inside to hear the music which William Andrews Clark Jr. makes possible.

Fortnight ago Los Angeles attempted to express its appreciation of PatronClark. Important citizens, including Mayor John Clinton Porter, gathered in Pershing Square across from the Auditorium. Laudatory speeches were made. Mrs. Leafie Sloan-Orcutt, an imposing grey-haired dowager representing the Los Angeles Philharmonic Woman’s Committee, pulled a silken cord, revealed a bronze Beethoven in long frockcoat, baggy trousers, hands clasped characteristically behind his back. Philharmonic musicians, who gave the statue in Patron Clark’s honor, sealed their gift with a stirring performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

At the opening concert last week nothing affected the audience so deeply as Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration which Conductor Artur Rodzinski placed on the program as a memorial to Patron Clark’s son, William Andrews III, who was killed last spring in an airplane crash. The orchestra, the audience knew, was Clark’s second son. He founded it in 1919, trailed it on its tours, in true paternal fashion made no complaint even when it ran into debt last year to the tune of $175,000.

Patron Clark’s father, the late fierce-whiskered Senator from Montana, taught his son to spend liberally. The elder Clark built a 130-room house on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, equipped it with a $3,000,000 art collection, a $120,000 gold dinner service. Senator Clark was a mule-skinner before he made his copper fortune. Son William had earlier advantages, took to them more quietly. He was a Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Virginia, acquired a love for books which has led to one of the most important private collections in the world. Old Senator Clark spent three months each year trying desperately to master French. Son William amuses himself by making French translations, spends much of his time in France partly because he rabidly resents the 18th Amendment.

No other Pacific Coast orchestra has a dependable backer. President Jacob Bertha Levison of the San Francisco Musical Association is not rich enough to support an orchestra and he would prefer playing his flute at home to wrestling any longer with deficits. In Portland this autumn players in the symphony are donating 10% of their salaries to help make the season possible. The Seattle Symphony will give only five concerts under dreamy British Basil Cameron whose contract was not renewed at the end of last season in San Francisco.

First concerts in St. Louis and Indianapolis last week were more in tune with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s unworried beginning. In St. Louis the sleek, gallic ways of Conductor Vladimir Golschmann have proved so popular that the orchestra was able to balance its budget this autumn by boosting ticket-prices. In Indianapolis the orchestra which Ferdinand Schaefer started with unemployed musicians on a co-operative basis (TIME, Nov. 10, 1930), is actually thriving.