Bliss and Things

When the late Real-Estate Operator Louis Eckstein was its hovering angel, Ravinia Park, on the North Shore near Chicago, was one of the best spots in the U. S. for summer music. Sponsored now by a committee of Chicagoans, Ravinia is still good. Its opening week, fortnight ago, attracted the largest crowd in its history, more than 10,000 people. Last week, when bolt-upright, beaky, baldish Sir Adrian Boult, music director of British Broadcasting Corp., opened his second week with the Chicago Symphony, a heat wave melted the attendance. Those who braved the swelter heard, and lustily applauded the first complete U. S. performance of a top-notch piece of movie music: a seven-part suite from Arthur Bliss's sound-track for the H. G. Wells fantasy, Things to Come.

Most of Things to Come is representational music. Its movements (with titles like "Attack," "Pestilence," "World in Ruin") describe a future world war and its aftermath. But to critics some of the Things appeared to have come out of the musical past rather than the future. They were reminded of England's late Composer Edward Elgar. Composer Bliss could not have been offended. His own estimate of his score: "It's all right on the surface. . . . It's dramatic, but it has little depth."

Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss, 47, was born in London, son of a U. S.-born chairman of Anglo-American Oil Co. Dapper, well-nosed, greying, Bliss is rated as a modernist with a sense of humor. Last month Manhattan heard the world premiere of a Bliss piano concerto, showy, noisy, built for big-muscled virtuosos and played (with the Philharmonic-Symphony under Sir Adrian Boult) by just such a pounder: a British onetime prodigy whose concert name is now simply Solomon.

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