Word: cincinnatis
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...Cincinnati's German-American burghers decided to have a big music festival. They got together the small singing societies in Cincinnati and nearby cities, invited famed Conductor Theodore Thomas to bring his own orchestra. The festival was such a rip-roaring success that it became the talk of every small town in the Midwest. Five years later, Cincinnatians decided that their festival needed a permanent home. So at a cost of $310,000 they built themselves what was then the largest and finest concert auditorium in the U. S. Today Cincinnati's enormous, ancient, many-spired Music Hall...
Last week Cincinnati held its 33rd festival. For nearly two years, three nights a week, the Festival Chorus had rehearsed the choral numbers that were to be its main attraction. The chorus' 400 earnest adult members included debutantes, cooks, physicians. chauffeurs, lawyers, knife grinders. All had attended rehearsals with religious regularity, knowing that sharp-nosed Festival Conductor Eugene Goossens would promptly bounce any half-hearted singer from the ranks...
When the five-day festival opened, even ramshackle Music Hall had had a coat of paint, and the smell of moth balls rose from Cincinnati's resurrected tail coats like incense in a cathedral...
...important and meaty modern works for chorus and orchestra were given first U. S. hearings. The first was a smoldering, wrath-&-judgment Old-Testament oratorio, Watchman, What of the Night? by James Gutheim Heller, rabbi of Cincinnati's aged Plum Street Temple. A chorus of 600 children helped Soprano Helen Jepson sing the second: a complicated Magnificat by German-born Hermann Hans Wetzler, who once played the organ in Manhattan's Trinity Church...
Salad and dessert were still to come. With Kirsten Flagstad, Marjorie Lawrence, Kerstin Thorborg, Eyvind Laholm and a galaxy of other top-flight singers, Conductor Goossens and his Cincinnati Symphony dished out the whole of Saint-Saens' opera, Samson et Dalila, and Act II of Wagner's Parsifal, threw in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and a brace of 18th-Century oratorios, and filled in the chinks with miscellaneous nuts and raisins of symphonic, operatic and choral music...