Music: From the Tabernacle

The 379 singers got off the Cunarder Saxoma at Greenock, Scotland, lined up on the pier on the River Clyde and began to sing (Loch Lomond). They kept singing all the way across Britain, Holland, Denmark and Germany—in crowded auditoriums, sight-seeing buses, third-class railway carriages and even on the streets. They had their share of crises, including—at Scheveningen, Holland—the loss of the conductor’s white dress waistcoat (two local tailors provided a new one in exchange for a pair of tickets). Everywhere they are stirring up waves of good feeling and applause. Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle Choir is a smash hit in Europe.

Behind the Music. In West Berlin last week, the touring choir was greeted by 2,500 Berliners, many of them Mormons themselves. On the station steps, a German Mormon choir burst into the great Mormon hymn, Come, Come Ye Saints, and the Americans joined in to thunder the final phrase: “All is well! all is well!” Next evening in a modernistic gymnasium, they stood scrubbed and friendly before 3,000 paying customers. Thunderous applause greeted the Battle Hymn of the Republic. After that, the choir ran through its religious repertory, from a semi-spiritual (Listen to the Lambs All A-Cryin’) to Bach, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. The audience demanded six encores. One choir rehearsal became a concert for 2,000 refugees from Germany’s Soviet zone, who were moved to tears. Wrote Berlin’s Telegraf: “This was not only music, but the building of a human bridge.”

Critics treated the group kindly all along the way, even in choir-heavy England, although many felt that such a large chorus should devote itself to large important works instead of the motley programs it sings. For these, Conductor J. Spencer Cornwall has his answer ready Our singing is for people, not for critics ” Adds Assistant Conductor Richard Condie: “Some of the things we do are certainly not great music, but we do them because there is something behind the music. If our sole purpose were to be a great musical organization there would not be so many older people in the choir. We have some people So years old.”

Some Misunderstanding. The 80-year-old MopnoagTabernacle Choir has been familiar-to U.S.” radio listeners for 26 years, but it had never toured abroad, largely because of cost. One problem: most of the choir members—including lawyers, clerks, filling-station attendants-would have to get leaves from their jobs. But the current tour (estimated cost: $800,000) was finally made possible by benefit dances, banquets, concerts and outright solicitation. To cover any remaining deficit, the wealthy church will dig into its own treasury. And employers, whether Mormons or not, gladly gave their employees leave.

Choir members feel that their tour is building friendship for the U.S. and understanding for their faith. Said one singer: “When people see we’re human beings who put our pants on one leg at a time, there’ll be less misunderstanding of our church.” But there is still some confusion abroad. “If,” said one girl singer grimly, “anybody else asks me how many wives my husband has, I’ll scream.”

Another fine U.S. musical export is the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, now in Europe. Beginning a tour that will include the Continent for the first time since Arturo Toscanini took it abroad 25 years ago, the orchestra got the gladdest welcome and the biggest raves any orchestra has ever had at the Edinburgh Festival. The press was more pro than con. Sample pro: the Manchester Guardian’s Neville Gardus noted that the scherzo of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 4 “received a performance which frankly left me … speechless with wonder and admiration.” Not so pro: John Warrack of the London Daily Telegraph found the same symphony played with “appalling force, shrieking with despair and spitting fury, unrelenting in its attack upon the nerves and battering malevolently at the ears. A shattered audience rose bravely at the end to acclaim the exhausted performers.”