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effacement, New York has found a musicianly head on which it can congratulate itself. His achievement was, almost primarily, a conquest of his musicians. There was the vastest difference between the fashion in which the instrumentalists played this music and the fashion in which those who accompanied other modern songs in times gone, acquitted themselves. When Eva Gauthier gave the three Japanese melodies of Strawinsky; when Vera Janacopoulos presented the Pribaoutki of the same composer, the musicians came on the stage grinning, to let the audience know they at least were not balmy. And their playing was without earnestness and incisiveness. But, during the Schoenberg, the playing was rich and smooth and telling. One does not know which to praise the more: the violin of Jacob Metechkin, the clarinet of Robert Lindeman, the flute and piccolo of George Possell, or the 'cello of Willem Durieux. What the score demands in faery-like delicacy and precision of tone, came out under the baton of the young conductor.
Greta Torpadie has long been known to us as a very charming and sympathetic young artist. On the night of February 4th, she began to assume in our eyes the stature of a genuinely great one. Her comprehension of Schoenberg's rapid and multicoloured moods; the sureness and freshness and beauty with which she delivered the exquisite music assigned to the speaker, was an expression of the sort one does not easily forget. Diction, tone-col- our, appearance; they were appropriate all. Here at last is a lieder-singer leaving little to be desired.
The Guild deserves heartiest thanks for the thrilling event. Without it, the season, one of the dullest we have ever experienced, would have been almost lifeless. It is upon organizations of its kind that we are coming more and more to depend for nourishment. The musical institutions of New York are dead. If the Guild continues in the path it seems to be cutting for itself; and moves ever nearer the most daring and hourly of expressions, never again letting a revolutionary work come to us ten years late, it will in a very brief time become the most important instrumentality in the entire field.
Paul Rosenfeld