Bread & Butter

To the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Conductor Charles Munch, the new concerto was "horribly difficult," but it had its good features; it "exploited the orchestra very adroitly, used the modern language" effectively and, altogether, it was "tres interessant." Pudgy Violinist Isaac Stern agreed. He had "worked and worked until the music was part of me." When his fiddling was finished, he grinned up into the balcony of Symphony Hall, then hammed his exit offstage, staggering as if brutally exhausted. Up in the balcony, smiling Composer William Schuman seemed satisfied with the rehearsal for the world premiere of his first concerto for violin and orchestra.

Schuman, who still finds time to compose despite his duties as president of Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music and director of publications for music publishers G. Schirmer, Inc., did not quite want to say his latest work was his best: "I have no stepchildren; if I slighted one work, it would feel hurt." But he had tried to compose a work "on the highest musical plane, exploiting the virtuosity of the violin and not just showing it off." The concerto had, he said, "a good deal of melody--and melody is the bread and butter of music."

Last week Boston symphony-goers got to hear the concerto too. What they heard was quite different from the somewhat eclectic Symphony No. 2 of Schuman they had first heard twelve years ago--and rewarded with "practically silence," as Schuman remembers it. A man who used to compose with one ear to Hindemith and Roy Harris (his teacher), the other sometimes to Atonalist Alban Berg, Schuman seemed to have found a little more of a style of his own at 39.

The first movement, full of vigor, speed and spirit, gave listeners a slice of "bread & butter"; there was a broad theme to hold on to, although in periods of paraphrase and pyrotechnics it sometimes slithered out of the average listener's grasp. In the second movement, an andantino "interlude," the violin sang a beautifully simple song. Composer Schuman split the furious pace of the last movement with a long brassy chorale.

To one listener the concerto seemed "somewhat like a surrealistic painting--with familiar and beautiful forms in unfamiliar relationships and in a dreamlike atmosphere." Another subtitled it "The id in search of itself." One Boston critic found it "crabbed and harshly dissonant"; another "wanting likability" and "without heart." But beaming Conductor Munch thought that "with Bartok, Berg and Bloch, it is one of the most important concerti." Bill Schuman himself, remembering the "practically silence" he once got in Boston, was mighty pleased with 2 1/2 minutes of applause.

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