Music: Summer Nights

Hot nights bring good cheap music to many a U. S. park, stadium, hillside. Launched with the St. Louis “Muny” opera (TIME, June 17), the summer music season was well under way last week at the following places:

¶ In Manhattan, sturdy little Jose Iturbi. by now accepted as a first-class conductor as well as a brilliant pianist, mounted a podiumin the floodlighted Lewisohn Stadium, led the Philharmonic-Symphony expertly through the Star-Spangled Banner, Wagner’s rousing overture to Die Meistersinger, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, three dances from De Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat and, with Violinist Albert Spalding, the Mendelssohn Concerto. As usual, aged Adolph Lewisohn, donor of the Stadium and a patron of the concerts, made a little speech. So did peppery, music-loving Mayor Fiorello Henry LaGuardia. Hooted and booed by radicals on the hard 25¢ seats, the son of a onetime Army bandmaster retorted: “Music hath charms even for the savage, but not for the ill-mannered.”

¶ The Pennsylvania Railroad donated four carloads of cinders. High-school teachers lectured their pupils about it. Gas and insurance companies enclosed its circulars with their bills. Shops dressed their windows with pictures of correct attire for the occasion. Radio stations ballyhooed it. All this massed effort was to make a success of the Robin Hood Dell concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which last summer ceased abruptly two weeks ahead of time, leaving a $20,000 deficit.

Since no manager would touch it this year, the orchestra men appointed a committee of their own, got Curtis Bok to be president, chipped in what they could, pledged themselves to give a full season even if they had to play to the shrubs and trees of Fairmount Park. They scheduled opera in English, Gilbert & Sullivan, “pop” and symphony concerts, ballets by Fokine, Humphrey-Weidman and Philadelphia’s Montgomery and Littlefield dancers. They promised to honor unused tickets left over from last summer’s fiasco.

When, on opening night, 7,000 people filled the seats in Robin Hood Dell, gloomy Philadelphians were honestly surprised, cheered themselves hoarse at the end. Conductor was Jose Iturbi who hurried down from Manhattan, played a Beethoven-Wagner program which the musicians had chosen for him.

¶ Atlantic City’s Steel Pier offers not only cinema, minstrel shows, a zoo, a World War museum, a haunted house, a miniature Alpine village. Davy Jones’s Locker, Tony Sarg’s Blue Grotto etc., etc., but also the Steel Pier Grand Opera Company which performs on summer weekend nights. Managed by Jules Falk, the company is staffed with able second-string singers, who have accomplished the unique feat of singing consistently and successfully in English for the past seven years. For all its garish and noisy surroundings, the Steel Pier repertoire is catholic enough to do credit to many a better-known company. Last week of the 31,000 people who thronged the pier, 1,200 filled the theatre, heard the opening double bill: Pagliacci and The Secret of Suzanne. Besides staples, the summer schedule includes such rarities as Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Bach’s Phobus and Pan, Debussy’s L’Enfant prodigue, Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona.