Merger

A musical merger capitalized by Columbia Broadcasting System to the extent of some three million dollars and involving seven leading concert managementssbwas last week effected in Manhattan. Immediate advantage of the merger appeared to lie in the economies made possible by unified management, elimination of petty competition and wasteful duplication. (Small cities have sometimes had three artists of the first magnitude performing within a single week, then no more music for the rest of the season). The merger does not necessarily provide for an immediate program of broadcasting by the management's famed artists over Columbia's chain, since many are bound by contract to other sponsors (Metropolitan Opera, Victor Talking Machine Co.). Columbia's present great contribution is the nation-wide broadcasting of New York Philharmonic concerts. Last week's merger is a move whose major effects lie well in the future, a smart, forehanded move by the managers and by President William S. Paley of the Columbia chain who is majority stockholder of the New Columbia Concerts Corp. For in order to hold its public, particularly if & when television becomes a competitive factor, radio will eventually need the first-rate talent which experienced concert managers are best able to find, handle, exploit.

First Times

In three leading opera houses last weeK, new operas had their premieres:

P: In Chicago the people's reaction to Hamilton Forrest's modernized Camille (TIME, Dec. 15) was best reflected by Critic Edward Moore of the Chicago Tribune. Said he: "It may be that Camille will classify as one of the successes of the 1930 operatic season. If this should be so it will be due more than any one element to that amazing person, Mary Garden."

P: At Manhattan's Metropolitan Soprano Lucrezia Bori and Contralto Gladys Swarthout were piquant, sprightly and properly pleased by the la-di-da wooing of Tenor Armand Tokatyan and Baritone Mario Basiola. The piece was Italian Composer Felice Lattuada's pleasant if unimportant version of Moliere's Precicuses Ridicules, presented as curtain-raiser to Modeste Moussorgsky's boorish peasant farce, The Fair at Sorochintzy, whose premiere was given the fortnight before.

P: In Berlin at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden was given an opera Fremde Erde (Foreign Soil) by Austrian Composer Karol Rathaus. Rathaus's hero is a Lithuanian immigrant to the U. S., his first scene the steerage deck of a transatlantic liner. The tragic ending is emphasized by the appearance of two drunken sailors, one of them playing "Yankee Doodle" a raucous accordion.

-Some artists represented by these managements: Sopranos Rosa Ponselle, Maria Jeritza, Elisabeth Rethberg, Amelita Galli-Curci; Violinists Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Albert Spalding, Yehudi Menuhin, Ruggiero Ricci, Efrem Zimbalist; Pianists Harold Bauer, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Jose Iturbi.

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