Boston Arts Festival Called General Success

For a while it looked as though there would be no Boston Arts Festival this year: the Park Commissioner refused to allow use of the Public Gardens because of all the trampling the grass underwent in previous years. But he finally yielded to the forces of culture when the Festival authorities promised to have the grounds reseeded, and the seventh annual Festival took place successfully, ending a week ago.

Some 187 works were displayed in competitive exhibitions from a field of nearly 2000 entries in painting, sculpture and graphic arts. The selection and prize juries were smaller than last year's; whether for this reason or no, the decisions were on the whole less praiseworthy. In painting there was almost no junk; but, unlike last year, there were very few exceptionally good works.

Last summer in these pages I recommended that photography join the other fields of competitive exhibition. This year the officials took a first step in that direction by offering an invitational exhibit of art by the top 14 West Coast photographers. Each photographer submitted two works of his own choosing, and the result was by far the most distinguished exhibit of the 1958 Festival.

As in the past, some kind of free entertainment was presented on a specially built stage every evening of the Festival. The celebrated dancers Andre Eglevsky and Mia Slavenska, with the Robert Joffrey Theatre Ballet, gave four performances. The Joffrey Ballet, consisting of eight young dancers, is a good company but not a fine one. All eight dance well by themselves, but they have not yet achieved the precision of ensemble that marks the best troupes. Eglevsky and Slavenska are both first-rank artists; but, in both of their duos, drawn from Tschaikovsky, they proved disappointing: Eglevsky had nothing to do except act as a prop for the ballerina.

Competing against low temperatures and a drizzle, Alfred Nash Patterson conducted a worthy semi-concert version of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, probably the finest British opera since Purcell's Dido.

I am not normally a William Saroyan fan, but I have to admit that he has outdone himself in writing The Cave Dwellers, which enjoyed a good run in New York this season. The play is a semi-realistic allegorical fantasy--sunny, warm and moving, especially in the second act.

Last year's opera choice, Menotti's The Consul, was most timely in view of recent events in Hungary. No less timely was this year's selection, in view of the announcement that the U.S. will attempt three lunar explorations this fall: Jacques Offenbach's musical fantasy, The Voyage to the Moon (1875). This was the American premiere of the work, and the first production of the newly-formed Boston repertory company, The Opera Group. The work was given in a brilliant English adaptation, complete with two full-blown ballets (on the front and back of the moon), and was hilariously staged and authoritatively conducted by Sarah Caldwell.

The Festival's final evening featured a concert of two works "written for the out-of-doors," played by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Richard Burgin. On the Festival stage 13 wind-players performed Mozart's Serenade in B-flat (K. 361). The performance went fairly well, but showed several signs of insufficient rehearsal (in the first minuet, the bassoonist even played his entire solo one bar ahead of everyone else).

Finally, 15 musicians boarded a swanboat decked with flowers and shrubs, and performed Handel's "Water Music" Suite while the boat sailed around the Public lagoon under floodlights, with thousands of people lining the banks all around. It was an amusing gimmick, but it badly misfired. Whenever the boat got 75 or so yards away, the strings and woodwinds became totally inaudible and one could hear only the two horns and, in the finale, the two trumpets. The basic idea was not bad; the choice of music was.

Now one can only look forward to the 1959 Festival with eagerness.