MUSICAL COURIER
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May 17, 1923
Behold My Servant Shall Prosper, bass solo from Jehovah’s Servant, sung by Albert Hall; Dixieland (piano), played by Samuel Sours; Ho Every One That Thirsteth, and The Lord God, two arias from Mr. Putnam’s sacred cantata, Jehovah’s Servant, sung by Manly B. Ramos; In the End of the Sabbath, tenor solo and unaccompanied quartet, from Jehovah’s Servant, Sidney B. Hall, Mrs. Rabe, Miss Almy, Mr. Browder; Novelette (piano), played by Audrey Bruton; Love’s Springtime, sung by Mrs. Rabe; I Will Give Thanks, from Jehovah’s Servant, and I Am the Richest Man in the World, and I’d Rather Have a Young Man, sung by Winifred Almy.
During the recital a telegram was received and read telling of the news of a gold medal being awarded to Mr. Putnam in his native State of South-Carolina for originality in composition. This award was made by the State Federation of Women’s Clubs at its annual convention at Converse College, Spartanburg, S. C., and announced by Mrs. H. M. Stuckey, chairman of the music department of the Federated Clubs.
Mabel Swint Ewer Organizer of Orchestra
Mabel Swint Ewer, organizer of the Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Philadelphia, comes from a very musical family. Her father, John Wendell Swint, although a successful business man, was an excellent violinist and much interested in music. Her mother was a pianist. Her sister, Mrs. Charles M. Robbins, contralto, is president of the Chaminade Club of Attleboro, Mass., and another sister,
MABEL SWINT EWER,
president and organizer of the Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Phiadelphia.
Mrs. Seth Ames Lewis of Springfield, Mass., is a pianist. Her brother, Wendell Richardson Swint, of Wilmington, Del., is a baritone. Mrs. Ewer was born in Boston, Mass., and lived there until she married at twenty-one and took up her residence in Pennsylvania. She studied cornet and trumpet with Joseph Hammond, Henry Brown, Theron Perkins and Kloepfel. She is a graduate from the New England Conservatory and played in the Conservatory Orchestra under Dr. George W. Chadwick and in the Boston Orchestral Club under Longy.
Mrs. Ewer was a member of a trumpet quartet and did solo work all through New England. At the age of fifteen she led a children’s orchestra. Although Mrs. Ewer is the mother of eight children, three of whom are living and show decided musical talent, she has never dropped her music.
Mrs. Ewer states that she always wanted an orchestra of her own, and in the fall of 1921 she decided to organize one. She did this by inviting a large group of musicians to a luncheon at her home in Swarthmore, Pa., and from this gathering thirty-five were selected for the new orchestra. This number soon grew to fifty and J. W. F. Leman was secured as director. The success which the organization has achieved under his leadership is well known. Many concert engagements have !been filled and there was a week of triumphs when the orchestra played at Keith’s Theater in Philadelphia.
The trumpet quartet of the orchestra is rapidly winning a name for itself, filling church engagements almost every Sunday and appearing at various other functions.
American Students Go Abroad with Calve
Mme. Emma Calve sailed recently on the S.S. La France. She will spend the summer at her chateau in the south of France and will return to New York in the early fall where she will open a school for developing advanced students for the opera. Several aspiring young students went over with Mme. Calve to spend the summer. One of them was Laura Doone Jackson, mezzo-soprano. Miss Jackson toured the country in Robin Hood, which was one of the units of the Dunbar Opera Company, and she was also the featured singer in another Dunbar Company which offered several performances of Carmen in the larger cities. Miss Jackson is a young woman of considerable personality and makes a very pretty stage picture. There is every reason to expect this young artist, under the tutelage of the great mistress of art, will develop into a very important singer.
OLD STEINWAY HALL TO GO
HISTORIC
(Continued from Page 6).
Lloyd, well known English tenor, was Elijah, and Mr. and Mrs. Georg Henschel also took part.
Some Who Played or Sang in Stein way Hall.
To give the names of those who at one time or another participated in concerts in Steinway Hall would be to name all the celebrated musicians of that period. When the hall was dedicated Theodore Thomas conducted the orchestra and Parepa Rosa was the singer. Other conductors who have been mentioned as having taken part in concerts there are Adolph Neuendorf! and Frank van der Stucken, but it is difficult to recall names unless there is a reference book available.
Rubinstein, Joseffy and Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler are pianists whose names are recalled, and among the singers were Patti, Etelka Gerster, Parepa Rosa, Emma Thursby, Annie Louise Cary, and Scalchi. Ovide Musin, violinist, played there, while Charles Dickens gave a reading in the hall during his American visit. S. B. Mills, whose name should be added to the pianists, also played there.
In making a list of others who played the Steinway piano in public during the past fifty or more years it would almost be easier to mention the names of those who had not done so. Nearly all the great artists have been at one time or another identified with the Steinway, and still are playing it whenever they appear publicly.
The New Building.
As soon as the plans for the new Steinway Building on Seventy-seventh street are ready they will be reproduced in the Musical Courier. Up to the present time nothing is available for the public, but it is safe to say that the design will combine beauty with utility and the new Steinway home will be as complete and well arranged as it is possible to make it.
Park Community Symphony Orchestra Heard
The Park Community Symphony Orchestra, Jacques L. Gottlieb conductor, gave two concerts on the evenings of May 1 and 2, the first at St. Ignatius Church and the second at the East Side Y. M. C. A., Eighty-sixth street and Lexington avenue. The Park Community Orchestra is an organization^ of fifty-five serious and interested non-professional musicians, of which Jacques L. Gottlieb has been conductor since its inception, several years ago. The orchestra has succeeded in gaining good results, which were demonstrated at these two concerts.
The orchestral numbers at both concerts comprised the overture Coriolanus, Beethoven; Allegro con brio and Andante con moto from Beethoven’s fifth symphony, and the symphonic poem, Les Preludes, by Liszt. Ella Good, contralto, was the assisting artist, singing Mon Cceur s’ouvre a ta voix, from Samson and Delilah, Saint-Saëns, as well as a group containing Still wie die nacht, Bohm; June, by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, and Homing, by Del Riego. Lynette Gottlieb, who accompanied the singer, gave excellent support, materially enhancing the beauties of the vocal offerings.
Eugen Putnam Awarded Gold Medal
Says the Danville (Va.) Register :
A select group of members of Danville’s musical circle attended and enjoyed a private recital of the piano compositions and songs of Eugen Putnam, composer-pianist, at Averett College last night, where Mr. Putnam is rounding out a decade as head of the music department. In the list of participants in the rendition of Putnam compositions were Mrs. Rabe, Miss Almy, M. B. Ramos, Jr., Basil Browder, Sidney B. Hall and several other singers, contributing the vocal part of the program, while well known pianists interpreted his instrumental compositions. The occasion was unique and was in the nature of an appreciation of Mr. Putnam, who is thoroughly consecrated to his chosen art if one may be said to choose what embodies not only talent but genius.
Well known musical publications and writers widely recognized in the realm of music criticism have paid unstinted tribute to the merit of some of the Putnam compositions, notably his Humoresque, a newer one entitled Novelette by reason of the novel effects sought and produced in the rendition, his Quill Dance, and a number of folk songs and ballads written in the popular present day style of piano composition. The composer is himself a brilliant performer and can naturally interpret his own work as few others, even among the great pianists, can do. Being in the nature of a private recital, last night’s affair was more notable for the character and quality of the audience than for numbers and it was an enthusiastically appreciative group.
The program was as follows : Humoresque (piano , played by Julian Skinnell ; Imperfect, The Postman (songs), sung by Jean Martin, the composer at the piano; Quill Dance (piano), played by Elizabeth Dodson; I Heard a Mighty Rumbling, a genuine negro spiritual, sung by Basil Browder ;
the commercial in a way that places the Steinway piano in the position that it occupies today, and which creates so much comment in the passing of Steinway Hall in Fourteenth street; therefore, what the new Steinway building will be in Fifty-seventh street is a matter of moment, not only to the musical but also the commercial world.
The Steinway Building.
It was in 1863 that the Steinway firm began the building on Fourteenth street which was finished in 1865. This has always been known as Steinway Hall and continues to bear that name although the concert hall which it contained has not been used for concerts since 1898. This building is on the north side of Fourteenth street between Union Square and the Academy of Music, which at that time was used for Italian opera. Steinway Hall is of white marble, four stories high, with a frontage of seventy feet, extending back to Fifteenth street, a depth of 207 feet.
The entire first floor from street to street was exclusively devoted to the exhibition and sale of the pianos manufactured by the firm. At the left of the entrance on Fourteenth street was a room for square pianos, and it measured seventeen feet high, twenty-three feet wide and eighty-four feet deep. From this room a door led into the house adjoining Steinway Hall on the westerly side, a building the firm was compelled to add to the new structure when business made demands for more space. The offices were located in this building, which was the residence of William Stein way. A telegraph wire connected these with the factory on Fourth avenue, Fifty-second and Fifty-third streets, two miles away, as well as with the metal works and saw mills at Astoria, L. I. The salesroom for second hand pianos and the salesroom for upright pianos were located near that devoted to squares. Grand pianos are in the easterly side of the building, where there are also two smaller rooms for the tuning and regulating of the grand pianos. There are other regulating rooms for tuners and polishers.
The main entrance to the warerooms and upper floors of the building is through a marble portico on Fourteenth street, which leads to a large vestibule, the door on the left opening into the warerooms, while that on the left led to the ticket office which was situated in a large vestibule with two wide entrances from Fourteenth street. It was from this vestibule that a staircase fourteen feet wide, with another staircase from the other vestibule led directly to the floor above, the vestibule on that floor being forty-two feet in height, thoroughly lighted and ventilated. Three large doors led to the main floor of the concert hall, with two separate stairways to each of the two balconies above.
A description of the building written in 1881 says: “The entire first floor of the building from Fourteenth to Fifteenth streets is exclusively devoted to the exhibition and sale of the pianofortes manufactured by the firm.” At that time there was a large room at the left of the entrance which was devoted exclusively to square pianos, a condition that no longer exists. By that time, 1881, grand pianos were coming to the front to such an extent that they were given a room nearly as large as the one devoted to the squares, in a building the firm had been obliged to annex in order to meet the necessities of a rapidly growing business. Upright pianos also had a room to themselves, but of course conditions are all so different now from forty or fifty years ago that warerooms and offices have had to be arranged to meet new requirements.”
Steinway Hall.
When built, the hall proper, where all sorts of musical events took place, was125 ׳ feet long, 75 feet wide and 42 feet high. There were 2,500 numbered seats to accommodate audiences that often overflowed into any unoccupied spaces. This was the large hall, with a small one seating 400 people opening from it and which could be completely shut off with sliding partitions. In the large hall a pipe organ of forty-two registers was placed. This hall was in constant use until 1889, when the space had to be utilized for the flourishing business that had rapidly outgrown the capacity of its home. The acoustic properties of the hall were admitted by both public and press to surpass those of any other hall in the United States. The concerts by the Theodore Thomas Orchestra were held here, and when Dr. Leopold Damrosch founded the Symphony Society of New York, those concerts also took place in this hall. It was at a performance of Elijah in 1880 that Dr. Damrosch conducted the orchestra, his son Walter being the organist on that occasion. Edward
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VOICE AND PIANO
DARIUS MILHAUD Child-Poems—Tagore O. G. SONNECK Studies in Song
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Serenade ..............
Wild Swans ............
Caliban in the Coal Mines
Night .................
To a Golden Haired Girl
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In a Ricksha .....
BERTA HECKER
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FREDERICK HOSCHKE Song Without Words Danse Bacchanale ..
A Tragedy ........
The Buffoon ......
Lucille ..........
Indian ...........
HARP TRANSCRIPTIONS CARLOS SALZEDO
Song of the Volga Boatmen ............50
Theme and Variations-Haydn ...........60
Largo---Handel .......................50
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