The Music Box

A small audience yesterday afternoon witnessed the introduction of the new Clear-Tone piano at the music room of the Piano-Craft Company. Justin Sandridge, a young Boston pianist, played a pretentious programme of Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Griffes. Mr. Sandridge's playing was full of feeling and a primitive and facile movement of rhythm. In the beautiful fourth Ballade of Chopin he exceeded himself in the passionate reiteration of the main theme in the middle section; also his final number, the Legends of St. Francis Walking on the Waves, brought forth the necessary brilliance and virtuosity that Pere Liszt always demands. The Sonata Appassionata and all the classics were lacking in mature understanding and finesse of technique.

The piano itself does produce extraordinarily clear and mellow tones except in the last two octaves of the upper and lower registers, which are too shallow and metallic and are without sufficient richness or body of sonority, respectively. The piano, however, has great possibilities, for a revision of the conventional grand has become more obviously necessary in the past few years. The number of dry and inflexible pieces of mechanism that have been manufactured by commercialists has increased insufferably. It is a curious phenomenon that the piano has remained the same for fifty years except for occasional experiments with double keyboards or more recently with electric tones. The innovating factor in the Clear-Tone instrument is that the ends of the strings are attached to steel bars and adjustable screws, not, as usually, to the iron frame, which is inharmonic to the tone of the strings, according to the inventor, Mr. E. W. Powers. A second sound board of maple, also increases the sonority. The inventor does not yet claim perfection for his instrument, but its development should revolutionize the piano to a certain extent.

* * *

Tannhauser will be broadcast in full from the Metropolitan Opera House at 1.35 P.M. over WEAF and WJZ on Saturday afternoon with Lotte Lehmann, Melchior, and Schorr; Artur Bodansky conducting. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, assisted by the St. Cecilia Society and David McCloskey, will play the fol- lowing programme, to be broadcast Saturday evening at 8.15 P.M. over WEAF; Introduction to Solomon, by Handel; Evocation, by Loeffier; Prometheus, baritone solo, by Hugo Wolf; and Brahms' Fourth Symphony. Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic will play Beethoven's Overture to Fidelio, all three of the Leonora overtures, and Brahms' First Symphony, on Sunday afternoon over WABC