The Boston Symphony

The Boston Symphony Orchestra began its seventieth season Friday afternoon in Symphony Hall. Everything about the opening concert was the same as at the beginning of the sixty-ninth season, the sixty-eighth, and so on as far back as anyone cares to remember.

Unlike the opening performance of the Metropolitan Opera season, at which elderly ladies resort to any extreme to achieve nationwide publicity, the patrons of the Boston Symphony filed quietly, as always, into the hall 15 minutes before the concert, greeted each other warmly, inquired how the summer had been at Prides Crossing of Manchester, and settled back to welcome the orchestra's conductor, Charles Munch.

The program for the first concert was all Beethoven. The orchestra held up extremely well considering that, at the moment, it has summer and winter conductors, each at opposite musical extremes. After a summer at Tanglewood under Koussevitsky's leadership, it takes a while to get used to the more subtle style of Munch. Nevertheless, Beethoven's first symphony, a comparatively fragile, early work, was handled with all the delicacy that can be expected of a full symphony orchestra. Ordinarily, the work should be performed by about 40 musicians, and it is a tribute to Munch that he could make the piece sound as though it were being performed by that number instead of by around 100.

It is an oven greater tribute to him and the abilities of his musicians that they played the third symphony of Beethoven right afterwards as though it were being played by several hundred.

The main thing was that the program which began with Beethoven's Overture to Fidelio was easy to listen to; it was well played, though not sensationally so, and it left everyone in a good mood for the start of the season.