André Tardieu (1876 – 1945),while writing for the French magazine TEMPS, committed to paper these unkind words regarding the Italian opera star Enrico Caruso (1873 – 1921) in an attempt, perhaps, to only slander Caruso’s many adoring American fans and the culture that created them.
…the American public admire only those artist’s for whom they pay dear.
Marking the occasion of the untimely death of American soprano Alma Gluck (born Reba Feinsohn; 1884 – 1938), music critic Samuel Chotzinoff wrote this essay in which he recalled witnessing the first meeting between Gluck and her (second) husband Efrem Zimbalist, Sr. (1890 – 1985) at the absolute height of her fame in 1911. The remembrance continues as Chotzinoff labels that era as being the ‘golden age of vocalists’ and recalls many of the finest qualities of her talent.
A printable music review by Lawrence Morton (1904 – 1987), long time advocate of modern music and habitual contributor to MUSICAL QUARTERLY and MODERN MUSIC. One of Morton’s greatest interests was the music of Stravinsky, and it is Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements that was discussed in this 1947 review:
The symphony opens in full orchestra with a mighty affirmation of confidence and resolution. Then the horns state the main problem with which the composer would confront us: other instruments reiterate it, as if to show it to us from new angles and with new perspectives…
This particular performance was conducted in Los Angeles by Otto Klemperer (1885 – 1973), who was singled out for high praise in this article.
The Cleveland Orchestra, on February 5 [1935], with Arthur Rodzinski conducting, will introduce to New York ‘Lady Macbeth of Mzensk’, an opera by twenty-eight year-old Soviet composer, Dmitri Shostakovich.
Shostakovich completed the work in December, 1932. It is the first of a projected cycle of four operas in which the composer plans to trace the condition of women in Russia…
One of the most popular portions of YANK MAGAZINE was a that small corner devoted to the happenings within the Big Band world titled Band Beat. Attached herein is the Big Band news from that department for the Spring of 1944 which kept the far-flung Americans up to date as to what was going on with Vaughan Monroe, Lina Romay, Duke Ellington, Charlie Powell, Jon Arthur, Jimmy Cook, Red Norvo and Bob Strong’s orchestra.
Unlike most other musicians in Italy, Arturo Toscanini (1867 – 1957) refused to scramble onto the Fascist bandwagon. He refused to preface his concerts with the Fascist anthem and eventually was made a virtual prisoner at his home. When he was permitted to leave his country, he vowed never to revisit it so long as Fascism held it in bondage.
Nowhere has the magic baton of Toscanini been more acclaimed than in the United States. Under its spell, the Metropolitan Opera made its highest artistic mark, and the New York Philharmonic became the world’s greatest symphonic ensemble.
In this article,YANK MAGAZINE correspondent Al Hine summed-up all the assorted happenings on the 1945 Big Band landscape:
The leading big bands now are Woody Herman’s, Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton’s. Benny Goodman, who broke up his own band for the umpteenth time, is a featured performer in Billy Rose’s super revue, ‘The Seven Lively Arts’, but the maestro is said to be thinking of turning over his Rose job to Raymond Scott and making another stab at the band business.
The attached six page article about Cab Calloway (1907 – 1994) makes no mention whatever of the three movies he had appeared in prior to 1941, but it answers many other questions you might have had about the musician’s first thirty-one years.
The attached article is yet another among the several tongue and cheek essays that the French composer Eric Satie (Alfred Éric Leslie Satie 1866 – 1925) contributed for the amusement of the fun-loving readers of VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE. Published just three years prior to his death, it is beautifully illustrated, and stands as one solid page of pure silliness in which Satie considered the place of art in the animal kingdom, and concludes that of all the arts, architecture and music are the only two creative endeavors that the creatures of the field ever seem able to embrace:
I know of no literary work written by an animal – and that is very sad.
Musical historian W.S.B. Mathews considers the three musical styles of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) and entirely dismisses the possibility that his deafness in later years effected his compositions not one jot.
