Music: 52-Cent Music

When Londoners began to cock their ears for bombs rather than Beethoven, London’s concert halls shut up shop. But last week London music opened at a new stand, started doing a rushing business. The hall was London’s venerable and massive National Gallery, whose thousands of priceless canvases were long since taken from their frames and stored “somewhere in England.” Famed British Pianist Myra Hess and her teacher, 81-year-old Tobias Matthay, thought up the cheerful idea of filling the empty, tomblike gallery with popular-priced concerts for London’s war-worried workers. With the help of a redheaded British adman named Ronald Jones, they got permission from His Majesty’s Office of Works to use the sacred space, announced a schedule of first-rate talent, invited the public to seven lunch-and-teatime concerts a week, at two & six (52¢) top.

For their first concert, a recital by Pianist Hess, they expected a scattering of two or three hundred, were surprised by more than 1,000, who sprawled on the floor, leaned against the pillars, clung to the gallery’s empty picture frames. (“Don’t sit on those frames, please,” pleaded the gallery’s sweating guards. “They cost £250 each.”) By the time the first week’s concerts were over, Pianist Hess had received nearly a hundred letters from famous musicians promising voluntary support, or services for a small fee, to help feed London’s starved music public.