Word: launcelots
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Shaking his fists instead of a baton, teetering now on one long leg, now on the other, shaking his shaggy head, laboring mightily beneath the warm August moon, Composer-conducter Albert Coates of London one night last week conducted the world premiere of his new symphony, Launcelot, in Lewisohn Stadium, Manhattan...
...sombre moaning of fiddles, melancholy piping of flutes and rumble of tympani a foredoomed Launcelot was born. Bells tolled faintly in the distance, harbingers of Woe. The scene changed abruptly. Seething with passion the Knight of the Lake invaded the bed of Queen Guinevere. Followed a pallid flashback to Elaine floating on her barge, dead for love. The mood became reminiscent: the love-blighted lily of Astolat guarding the wayward knight's shield in a tower, pining away. The barge motif was again heard. Betrayed, undone, Queen & lover fled Camelot, Guinevere to Amesbury nunnery and the veil, Launcelot...
When the premiere was over the meagre audience applauded apathetically. Next morning critics in the public prints seemed doubtful, unconvincingly called it "music on the grand scale" or echoed Critic Herbert Hughes's (London Daily Telegraph) florid romantics, printed in the program. Reflective listeners decided Launcelot might be more effective if halved, with fewer thematic repetitions, or conversely, expanded into a full-length, Neo-Wagnerian opera as Coates first intended to do. Bold or brave was he to introduce his work on the same night with such magna opera as Respighi's orchestration of Bach's Passacaglia...
Back to the U. S. for his third season as guest conductor of Manhattan's Stadium Concerts last week came Albert Coates, conductor of London's Symphony. With him he brought Launcelot, his new symphony based on Arthurian legend. When questioned about it, Composer Coates answered newsmen brusquely, told them Launcelot was romantic in conception-therefore in the tradition of all true opera-that he had little sympathy with jazz, cacophony, dissonances, or other "modernistic" effects. Yes, he had been conducting in London, Berlin, Paris the past year; he was pleased with the reception...
Manhattan. Second oldest of U. S. summer concert programs (13th season) is the Philharmonic-Symphony series held in Lewisohn Stadium. Notable on the program of eight weeks will be the "Launcelot" symphony of Albert Coates, conductor of the London Symphony, which will be given its premiere under his baton. Composer Coates, whose one-act opera Samuel Pepys took musical Munich by storm last winter (TIME, Jan. 6), will conduct during the fourth, fifth and sixth weeks; Conductor Willem van Hoogstraten of the Portland (Ore.) Symphony Orchestra, the first three and last two. First-nighters last week flocked to hear...