Music: Artistic Success

Last month “America’s handsomest symphony conductor,” Macklin Marrow, was hired by The Bronx Theatre League—a 100% cultural group headed by the president of The Bronx Women’s Club, the president of The Bronx Soroptimists and Borough President James J. Lyons—to give “the very first series of Standard Symphonic Concerts ever staged in The Borough of The Bronx.” Handsomest Conductor Marrow is a Virginia-born batonist who was once musical director of the Provincetown Players and who, last spring, put on some chamber concerts at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel at which audiences put themselves in fine fettle by drinking and smoking while listening to music by 35 players, mostly from the New York Philharmonic Symphony. Mr. Marrow and the same 35 turned up in The Bronx Concourse Plaza last fortnight as the New Court Symphony. But ten players had to be jettisoned at once when it appeared that the grand ballroom would not be grand enough to hold the full orchestra and the audience which it was expected would fill the 1,200-odd seats at $1 a head.

To the chagrin of the clubwomen and President Lyons, who never misses an opportunity to proclaim the cultural advantage of “The Borough of Universities” (Fordham, N. Y. U.), less than 500 people came to the opening concert. Foreseeing deficits of $1.500 per concert, the thrifty backers of The Bronx Symphony backed out. Last week, for the time being at least, The Bronx Symphony appeared faced with the appalling prospect of meeting its contracts with Mr. Marrow and his men by holding concerts in Brooklyn or Manhattan. Wistfully to President Lyons the pressagent of the Symphony wrote that the performance had been “one of the greatest artistic successes ever staged in Greater New York. . . . The few people who attended the opening performance were actually astounded by its excellence.” Less wistfully, the managing director of The Bronx Theatre League admitted: “The concert was a financial headache and a heartache. There were too many deadheads and these concerts are too expensive to give away.”