Music: Cleveland’s Trumpets

During the Cleveland Orchestra’s breakneck European tour (eleven countries, 29 concerts in 41 days), its reception has been in tune with the critic of Paris’ Le Monde, who thought that he had “never heard anything more excellent.” In Barcelona audiences cheered their approval of the orchestra’s classical repertory. For Budapest-born Conductor George Szell, the greatest recognition came in Vienna. where that dean of critics, grumpy old (83) Max Graf, who knew Szell as a boy, voiced one of his rare, muted raves. “The sounds,” he said, “were good indeed.”

It was in Poland last week that the enthusiasm for the Clevelanders reached its highest pitch. Cabled a TIME correspondent after one of the orchestra’s fine concerts: “I was sitting on a piano bench in the wings, and the floor was throbbing under me as a thousand pairs of stamping feet greeted the end of every piece.”

Mostly, the Poles stamped for the same old warhorses the Clevelanders had played elsewhere—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Strauss’s Don Juan, excerpts from a Ravel Daphnis and Chloö suite. There was little stamping—only applause—for newer works (by Wallingford Riegger, Samuel Barber, Paul Creston, Bela Bartok). Said Dziennik Polski: “The Cleveland Orchestra plays like one magnificent soloist . . . A thing like yesterday’s concert was never before seen or heard here!”

In their brief contacts with Polish musicians, the Clevelanders discovered men of first-rate talent, starved for news of the outside musical world. Most of them were eager to try out the American orchestra’s glittering instruments. Harpist Alice Chalifoux gave away most of her reserve supply of harp strings; other Clevelanders contributed fiddle strings, mouthpieces and clarinet reeds to the Polish musicians. Cleveland’s First Trumpeter Louis Davidson gave one of his $300 trumpets to Trumpeter Francisek Stockfiscz of the Katowice Philharmonia (the Cleveland Orchestra management promised to buy Davidson another). “Thank you,” said Stockfiscz at a formal banquet. “You have changed my life.”