Music: Plum Pudding a-Plenty

Said one visitor from Los Angeles, who had managed to breakfast on a symphony concert, lunch on T. S. Eliot’s new play, The Cocktail Party (see THEATER), and sup on Verdi’s A Masked Ball: “I feel as if I had eaten too much plum pudding. But the awful thing is I want more.”

Last week the first of some 60.000 other visitors—Danes on their bikes, Hollanders in hobnailed boots, American girls in nylon dresses—were” also gorging themselves on musical goodies as long as they could stay at the table. With a swirl and a flourish down the Royal Mile, Edinburgh’s third and already famed International Festival of Music and Drama was under way.

No Obedience. For an opening appetizer, shrewd Manager Rudolf Bing (who will get a chance to demonstrate his shrewdness as manager of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera next year) served up one dish that is always good for a gander.

Able, splenetic Sir Thomas Beecham had once disdained the Scots as “damned fools to throw away £60,000 on a festival.” But on opening night, before a jammed audience in Usher Hall, he was right there, ready, and with Franck, Sibelius, Brahms and Berlioz, he put on as good a show as ever. When he waved the men of his Royal Philharmonic to their feet on the fourth curtain call, they sat still; he howled at them in mock fury, then turned to the delighted audience: “You have observed, ladies and gentlemen, that this orchestra has every sort of virtue but one—obedience.”

No Stranger. Rudi Bing had other tempting dishes on his menu. While some visitors trudged through grey Edinburgh Castle and peered into ancient Holyrood House, others queued up for tickets for the Busch and Griller quartets and the festival favorite, The Three Estates (TIME, Sept. 20, 1948), the Glyndebourne operas (Mozart’s COST fan Tutte, Verdi’s A Masked Ball) were already sold out, except for the £2 seats, which were too expensive for the British.

Other eagerly awaited festival newcomers were Berlin’s famed Philharmonic and one of the men who would conduct it. Globe-trotting Eugene Goossens was no stranger to Britain;* he was born there, and had conducted many an opera, ballet and concert there over the years. But some festival visitors knew him more recently as the man who had led the Cincinnati Symphony for 16 years, then left the lush musical pastures of the U.S. two years ago to pioneer in the musical wilderness of Australia.

He had set out to make his Sydney Symphony Orchestra “one of the first five or six in the world.” He had succeeded, at least for Australian critics.

“Much Boomerang.” At week’s end, British critics found Goossens a man who “gives an impression of almost frightening efficiency,” although they found his Berliners, by comparison with Beecham’s Royal Philharmonic, slightly drab. Some found fault with his Mozart “Jupiter” (too dull). But after Roy Harris’ brassy Third Symphony and Goossens’ own Oboe Concerto (written for and played by his brother, the great oboist Leon Goossens), they had to admit that “the results [of his efficiency] certainly [were] confirmed a hundredfold.”

Biggest hit was a piece Goossens had brought with him, “a piece … for Australia to be proud of.” Concertgoers got a kick out of the program notes of John Antill’s ballet suite Corroboree (aborigine for get-together): “Much usage of boomerang, spear and fire sticks.” But its savage and original rhythms and percussive effects excited them to an ovation when it was over, though a member of the orchestra said, “From within, it sounds only like noise.”

*And no stranger to 20 of the Berlin Philharmonic’s older musicians; he had been the first foreigner to conduct them after World War I.