Central Park Garden Concert

Includes program.

“The hot weather last night thinned the hall of the incomparable concerts of Thomas but crowded the adjoining garden to its utmost extent. Around each table in the scanty shrubbery, which extends from Fifty-eighth to Fifty-ninth street, was a cosily-located group of music lovers. The programme, without being particularly flush in musical grandeur, had novelties enough to satisfy the most exacting. There were a march by Kiel, a young man in Berlin, who seems to think that mere contrapuntal knowledge is sufficient to create a work; an overture to ‘Richard III.,’ by Volkmann, an old man of Hungary, who looks upon Shakespeare as a species of gnome; a capriccio, by the Russian Beethoven, Glinka, an admirable piece of workmanship; a somnambulistic Berceuse, by Buergel, and an overture, “Ein feste Burg,’ by Joachim Raff. The last mentioned is the most pretentious of all, and is weak to an unwarrantable degree. Herr Raff’s treatment of the grand old hymn of Luther seems like decorating an elephant with flowers or putting a Mansard roof on the pyramid of Cheops. It is tawdry and inefficient. Schumann’s interlude and invocation of the Witch of the Alps, from his ‘Manfred,’ is in his in his accustomed gloomy, funereal style. Liszt was represented by a symphonic poem, taken from Schiller (‘The Ideal’), in which he displayed to an unwarrantable extent this utter want of ideas and power of instrumental effects. The lovely theme and variations, opus eighteen, for string orchestra, made the feature of the concert. Strauss was heard in a very pretty waltz, ‘Flugschieften [Flugschriften],’ and Gounod contributed his well-known ‘Saltarello.’ The orchestra of Theodore Thomas seems to increase in excellence every year. The materials have now become parts of a perfect piece of mechanism, and it would be difficult, even in Europe, to find such another body of well-trained musicians.”