Concerts and Music in the New Yorker
On Sunday, April 21, the program of dance from Ballet Theatre (forerunner of American Ballet Theatre) resumed at the Metropolitan Opera House, at that time a yellow-brick building on Broadway between 39th and 40th Streets, after a post-season opera interlude that included performances of “Parsifal,” “Rigoletto” and “La Boheme.” According to Robert A. Simon’s review in this issue, prima ballerina Alicia Markova (nee Lilian Alicia Marks in London) had given a performance in “Giselle” that “people will be telling you about, and rightly, for a long time” during the Ballet Theatre’s previous seven week engagement. Dance enthusiasts could also catch Charles Weidman and his group at the Central High School of the Needle Trades at 225 West 24th St, while Asadata Dafora and his group were presenting a program of African dances at Carnegie Hall.
The Philharmonic was performing an all-Gershwin concert at Carnegie Hall with Oscar Levant at the piano joined by the original leads of “Porgy & Bess.” Simon gave a rave review in the issue to the Philharmonic’s performance with the Westminster Choir of Beethoven’s Ninth under conductor Artur Rodzinski at Carnegie Hall. The concert included Bernard Rogers' "In Memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt," a "subdued but expressive elegy." Simon also reviewed the last two concerts by the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall that featured three American works. One was Samuel Barber's cello concerto, played for the first time and "executed with fine skill and musicianship by Raya Garbousova,“ for whom it had been composed. Simon found Sergei Koussevitsky's conducting masterful. The concert also included a suite from Aaron Copland's ballet "Appalachian Spring," which Simon noted "already has won a place in orchestral repertory," and David Diamond's "Rounds for String Orchestra," first heard in New York the prior spring at a concert at Columbia University. Interestingly, but not noted by Simon, all three of the composers in this All-American concert were gay.
Wings Over Jordan, “an all-Negro choir,” which had a nationally broadcast Sunday morning radio show in the 1930s and 40s, was performing a concert of spirituals at Town Hall on 43rd Street. Also scheduled for Town Hall that week was pianist Vladimir Horowitz and blues legend Huddy Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly.
The Leftist faithful looked forward to Josh White, Susan Reed and Billie Holiday headlining a concert of folk music at Carnegie Hall on the 19th benefiting the Greater New York Committee for Russian Relief and to bass baritone Kenneth Spencer in a benefit concert for the National Negro Congress at Town Hall on Easter Sunday. Spencer, an African-American who was appearing at this time on Broadway in the revival of “Showboat,” had a brief Hollywood movie career (“Bataan,” “Cabin in the Sky”) and radio show in the 1940s.
The magazine also noted highlights from the April list of Victor Records including the first complete recording of Stravinsky's "Le Chant du Rossignol" (Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony); Prokofieff's "Scythian" suite (Desire Defauw and the Chicago Symphony); Ferde Grofe's "Grand Canyon Suite" (Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony); Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony (Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony); Vincent d'Indy's "Istar"-Symphonic Variations, Opus 42 (Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony); and Horowitz's performance of Prokofieff's Sonata No. 7, Opus 83. Russian classical music was big in 1946.