Music: Sample Screeches

Five conductors will have gone to bat with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony before great Arturo Toscanini returns late in January. Otto Klemperer, Hans Lange and Werner Janssen have had their turns. Bruno Walter’s begins next week. Last week’s Philharmonic guest was Artur Rodzinski, popular conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra.

Conductor Rodzinski’s début concert was the loudest if not the loveliest that New Yorkers have heard this season. He swayed excitedly from side to side, made fierce faces at the players to bring out every last theatric effect. Scriabin’s Divine Poem, stunningly bombastic, compelled an ovation for the hard-working Clevelander. But Rodzinski had still louder music: two entr’actes from Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

Great curiosity awaits the Shostakovich opera which will be given this winter in three U. S. cities.* Soviets regard the 28-year-old composer as their ablest musicmaker. His murderous heroine is really a lovable young woman driven to her crimes by incompatible bourgeois surroundings. One sample played last week by Rodzinski follows the scene in which Ekaterina (Lady Macbeth) murders her father-in-law. The second describes two drunken moujiks as they discover her husband’s body hidden in a cellar. When audiences can see the spooky doings on the stage they may be impressed by the Shostakovich screeching. But the orchestra bits played last week left an impression of dressed-up bogeymen too noisy to be terrifying.

*The Cleveland Orchestra will give the first performance in Cleveland Jan. 31, repeat it in Manhattan, Feb. 5, sponsored by the League of Composers. The Philadelphia premiére will be given by the Philadelphia Orchestra March 15.