Music: Kitchen Sonata

That noisy part of a symphony orchestra where big men thump, rumble, tinkle and crash away at drums, gongs, cymbals and triangles is known as the battery, or percussion section. Orchestra players call it the “kitchen.” Like pepper in soup, the kitchen’s function is usually to supply seasoning for the climaxes of a symphony. Only once in a blue moon, as in the cannon shots of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, does the kitchen get a chance to put on a solo.

Last week at Manhattan’s Town Hall, the kitchen strayed into the parlor. For days, white-haired, wispy Composer Bela Bartok, famed Hungarian modernist, had rehearsed the first performance of a Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion Instruments. He and his pretty, blue-eyed wife, Ditta Pasztory, played the piano parts. New York Philharmonic Tympanist Solly Goodman and Cymbal & Gong Virtuoso Henry Denecke, surrounded by seven drums, two pairs of cymbals, a triangle and a xylophone (some of them played with their feet), had grown as skittish as a couple of prima donnas. But by the time they got it whipped into shape, the sonata sounded like a piano conservatory tinkling sweetly above the din of a well-oiled, distant boiler works. Town Hall’s audience applauded loudly at its close.

One of the few Kulturbolschewik composers still living in southeastern Europe, Bela Bartok, up to now, has shuttled unperturbed across the Atlantic. A Nazi-hater who refuses to speak German any more because “to me it is a dead language,” he got out of Europe last month with hardly a change of underwear. While he and Mme. Bartok raced in a bus from Geneva to Lisbon, their baggage got sidetracked and missed the boat. In the music roll under Bela Bartok’s arm was the manuscript of his Kitchen Sonata.