Military Concerts

“The German Imperial Band arrived in this city yesterday. Last night they floated their musical countrymen back to Fatherland on the ‘billows of sweet sound.’ Jones’ Wood, often gay and brilliant, was never more gay or more brilliant than it was yesterday evening.”

Reception on Saturday by the German Landwehr Verein at the Turn Hall, following the band’s arrival from the Boston Jubilee concerts.

“The Kaiser Franz Grenadier Prussian band has been delighting the lovers of music in general, and our German fellow-citizens in particular, by concerts at Jones’s Wood on Saturday and yesterday. So great was the desire to hear the performances of this brilliant musical corps, that the aggregate receipts for the two days reached the sum of $18,000. The concerts will be continued during the coming week.”

“An enthusiastic reception was given to the Imperial German band at Jones’s Wood on Saturday and yesterday. The receipts from the sale of admission tickets on Saturday were over $3,000 and yesterday nearly $15,000, all of which goes into the pockets of the visiting musicians. The weather was beautiful, and the breezy belvedere was packed with an audience that matched in vehement applause the one whose plaudits shook the very rafters of the Academy the other night in testifying its delight over Dan Godfrey’s music.

“There is the greatest possible contrast between the two royal bands in question. Godfrey’s is distinguished by its sensuousness and mellowness of tone as a marked characteristic, while Herr Saro’s is peculiar for masculine vigor and a method carried to the extreme of precision. The music of the one suggests a ball-room blazing with beauty, and that of the other the tread of conquering battalions. In the one there is something of the ‘lascivious pleasings of the lute,’ in the other the call to battle, the song of regiments, and the rejoicing over victory. Then, again, the contrast between the personal appearance of leaders and band is very remarkable. Godfrey, as, it may be recollected we said on Saturday, seems more like a German doctor of philosophy than a band-master, while the grand German leader, towering above his men, looks not only every inch a soldier, but every inch a king of musicians. The one wields his baton in an awkward way, with a stiff wrist, the other holds and sways his as if it were a sceptre. The English band play at Buckingham, St. James, and Windsor ‘drawing rooms,’ and never take the field; the German one follows the great Emperor into every battle, serves with the ambulance corps, and its leader’s breast is decorated with the iron cross of valor and a half dozen other medals, each a certificate that he has breathed the smoke of a battle and done some brave deed, and many of the musicians are similarly adorned. Saro’s very appearance electrifies his audience, while, in the case of the Englishmen, one’s attention is almost wholly given to the band, and not to the leader.

“But, unlike as the two bands are in so many other particulars, they resemble each other in the perfection of their performance. Each plays with exquisite skill and taste the style of music to which it is best adapted, and each furnishes in its composition unanimity and discipline, a model for our imitation. As the musical world is interested in all that concerns these jubilee foreign bands, a few facts not yet given by the Boston correspondents may be acceptable.”

Followed by a biographical sketch of Heinrich Saro; instrumentation of the band; programme for Saturday’s concert.

Band’s arrival in New York.