Word: chicago
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...symphony orchestras employ unemployed musicians. But they seldom draw crowds or move their listeners to rafter-raising applause. An exception to this rule is Chicago's WPA orchestra, the Illinois Symphony. When it was first organized in 1935 the Illinois Symphony was one of the Federal Music Project's ugly ducklings. For a year it bettelhtooped almost unnoticed. In the summer of 1936, the Music Project's pompous national director, Nikolai Sokoloff, went to Chicago to rehearse it for a concert under his own baton. When he heard it play he was afraid to be seen...
Then things began to happen. Word soon spread around that the show at the Great Northern Theatre was worth the price of admission (55? top). Chicago's best critics ventured inside, came out beaming. Music lovers began to go, found that Chicago's most energetic baton-waving and most stimulating symphonic programs were being dished out by, its WPAsters...
When great Finnish Composer Sibelius' Fifth and Sixth Symphonies got their first Chicago hearings, it was not the venerable Chicago Symphony but the sprouting Illinois Symphony that played them. The Illini played few symphonic chestnuts, never repeated a composition. By the end of last season they were giving even more "first performances" than Serge Kousse-vitzky's pioneering Boston Symphony. Some of their firsts were imported, some domestic. Last week they played their hundredth composition by a U. S. composer...
...disgust three years ago, he left the job of reorganizing the orchestra in Solomon's hands. A shrewd young man, as well as a talented maestro, Conductor Solomon saw at a glance that his WPA outfit could never compete on the same grounds with the seasoned, long-established Chicago Symphony. So he and State Project Director Albert Goldberg planned something different. Leaving the classics to white-mustached Frederick Stock, they concentrated on the moderns that Stock was too busy to play. Some of them were not worth playing. But all of them were news. Soon the Illinois Symphony...
...breakage and not too strenuous for any active man. It has recently attracted many women players. Most notable: British Margot Lumb, who beat Tennist Helen Jacobs last fall in the women's tennis at Forest Hills. The U. S. amateur championship, contested last month in Chicago, was won by Donald Strachan of Philadelphia...