Springtide Festival: 9th

For the Orpheon Free School fund. 

“Mr. Jerome Hopkins’ ninth Springtide Festival in aid of his Orpheon Fund was held at the Academy of Music Saturday evening. Some creditable amateur solos, a great deal of capital choral work—the praise for which is directly due to Mr. Hopkins—and some instrumental music, mainly from Mr. Hopkins’ pen, and executed by an orchestra under the baton of the composer, were the features of the affair.”

“For nine years Mr. Jerome Hopkins has made a practice of giving a spring concert, which, doubtless, to many of those interested is really as well as nominally a festival. The purposes of the concert are to give encouragement to the scholars of the Orpheon free choral schools, and to enlist the attention and support of the public for Mr. Hopkins’s laudable enterprise. By his energy and the persistence with which under many difficulties he pursues his undertaking, Mr. Hopkins has undoubtedly done a great deal within the last ten years to encourage the love of the fairest of the arts in many hundreds of households that would otherwise be silent and tuneless. The cost of obtaining a musical education in these days is so great that it is no slight matter to find that education offered gratuitously, and all through the exertions of a single man. Of course when Mr. Hopkins gives a concert it is with the aid of such material as he has, not with such as he chooses. His voices are not all picked ones, but just such as come to a school where all are made welcome. To apply the ordinary critical standards of judgment to the efforts of such an organization would be equally unreasonable and ungenerous. It is sufficient to say that the choruses were sung with spirit, heartiness, and appreciation. Such a society can only expect to rough out its work with energy; the finer points of expression, shading, and contrast come with later studies. In the respect that it exhibited Mr. Hopkins’s plans in highly successful operation, and a decided interest in them on the part of his scholars, as well as of the public, the concert was all that could have been desired.”