The Music Box

The Saturday evening concert at Symphony Hall was a most pleasing two hours of unpretentious and gay music except, of course, for the fervent piece of Sir Edward Elgar. And oddly enough, all the composers whose operas were presented are dead except one.

The E flat Symphony of Mozart is as happy a composition as may be found in musical literature, though it was not played with all the spontaneity that might have been wished for. There is a passage in the last movement in which there is no theme but just a general movement of jollity among the strings. Even the "lyric pathos" of the andante perhaps never intended to possess all the profundity that "Sturm and Drang" commentators embillish it with. More Mozart the audience seemed to want, and certainly we could enjoy it more often than the current programmes have allowed.

Professor Hill's Concertino on second hearing was perhaps more ingratiating than at its premier two years ago. It succeeds in accomplishing its intentions with proper buoyancy and Lustigkeit. The concertino is in one movement, opening with a jazzy theme and then passing to a brief slow movement; from a grand splash for the piano, a vigorous rondo, interspersed with a recurrence of the previous themes, concludes the piece. Pianists may rightfully resent the use of the "instrument of the immortals" as a mere bundle of hammers.

Next week's concert will be a rare combination of Scheenberg's "Pelleas and Melisande", the "Unfinished Symphony" of Schubert, and Strauss' "Tyl Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks".