THE MUSIC BOX

Once a year in the spring, the Harvard Glee Club, the Radcliffe Choral society, and the Boston Symphony pool their talents, and give a Pension Fund Concert that for many is the highlight of Boston's musical season. The bulk of these concerts has usually been one of the great religious choral works, simply because the Latin biblical and liturgical texts with their unity of feeling, their rich variety of emotional colors, and their singable sonority have always inspired the best composers to their best choral writing. This year, Koussevitsky has chosen two magnificent old ticket-sellers for his program, the Beethoven Ninth or "Choral" symphony, which is religious in feeling even though it uses Schiller's "Ode to Joy" as a text, and the Bach "Magnificat."

To say anything in praise of the Ninth would be impossible without dragging out our hackneyed friend, the Hollywood adjective. Beethoven, already deaf but still in his prime, planned this symphony on a scale that transcends in power and breadth of conception anything written in this form before or since, but yet cast it all in good sonata form. He might be said to have transcended mere structure to have given structure its highest significance. As a matter of fact, when faced with the originality of the ideas in the Ninth and the splendor of their execution, discussions of "form" tend to become meaningless. Only in the case of such composers as Bruckner or Mahler who try to imitate the Ninth and fail through lack of sustained inspiration, do you begin to worry about form, and notice how the composer has to prop up his sagging material by orthodox sonata devices which often retard the music rather than help it. Beethoven in the Ninth, however, despite the massiveness of much of the thematic material and the lengthened time-scale, has managed to keep a perfect equilibrium between the parts. The choral movement, one of the most exhausting twenty minutes of singing in musical literature, from a purely musical standpoint develops logically from the rest of the symphony, but, in my opinion, does not quite equal the other three movements in inspiration.

Some reactionaries, no doubt the same ones who are against opera in English or Goodman playing Mozart, don't like the choral movement merely because it is choral, and therefore not "pure" music. In this particular movement, however, Beethoven used his chorus symphonically, thus keeping the musical design intact, and making good use of the vibrant sonority of the human voice which remains the most basically expressive of all musical instruments.

The Bach "Magnificat" is a series of alternating choruses and solos, set to the words of the Virgin Mary's prayer. Except for the lovely "Suscepit Israel" there is nothing particularly virginal about the choruses which include some of the most powerful Bach outside of the B Minor Mass.

This year's Glee Club, by its conductor's admission, is one of the best in many years, and promises to give a performance that will shake the Symphony Hall statutes off their pedestals. The concert will take place Sunday afternoon April 26 and tickets are now on sale at the box office.