Central Park Garden Concert

Includes program. 

“The concerts at the Central Park Garden this week have continued to draw good audiences, and the programmes have been as full as ever of interest and variety. Liszt’s grand Festival March, written for the Goethe celebration in 1851at Weimar, where Liszt did so much of his noblest and most valuable work, was played on Tuesday, and with it were place several of the choicest selections we noticed last week, such as Schubert’s overture to ‘Fierabras’ and Weber’s to ‘Abu Hassan,’ the Quintet from the ‘Meistersinger,’ and Hoffman’s ‘Hungarian Suite,’ the last named work having established itself as a popular favorite. On Thursday we had an admirable Heroic March by Saint Saëns, of Paris, who succeeded Lefébure-Wély as organist of the Madeleine; and there were two other compositions of great interest, hitherto unknown in New-York, one by the veteran Ferdinand Hiller and the other by Carl Reinecke. Hiller’s, styled as a ‘Dramatic Fantaisie,’ is an overture written for the opening of the Stadt Theater in Cologne on the 1^st of September, 1872. Illustrating the different varieties of performance which the new building might be expected to witness in the course of its existence, it passes with tolerable rapidity from the somber tones of Tragedy through a lively measure representing Comedy, a richly colored characterization of the spectacular Drama, and a capital specimen of Ballet music, to the impassioned strains of the Opera. There must of necessity be more or less appearance of patch-work in an overture constructed upon the principle Hiller has adopted in this occasional production; but the essential defect has been in a great degree concealed, and the hand of a master is clearly perceptible from the first bar to the last. Reinecke’s overture, entitled “An Adventure of Handel’s,’ is the introduction we believe to a little vaudeville, founded upon the story of the origin of the ‘Harmonious Blacksmith.’ The ‘adventure’ is of very doubtful authenticity, and Handel’s claim to the air has even been called in question, though without sufficient reason. The tale goes that while Handel was chapel master at Cannon’s, the famous house of the Duke of Chandos near London, he was caught one day in a shower on the Edgeware road and went into a forge for shelter. The blacksmith was singing an old song and hammering the while at his anvil, and the ring of the hammer made a sort of continuous bass to the melody. Whether this was really the origin of the air which has been such a favorite for a hundred and fifty years, no one really knows. The name of the ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’ was not applied to it until long after Handel’s time, and it originally appeared without distinctive title, as an Air and Variations (in E major), in the first ‘Suite de Pièces pour le Clavecin,’ which the great master wrote for his pupil, the Princess Anne. The story is very prettily treated in Reinecke’s overture, and it needs no great stretch of fancy to trace the development of the musical idea, from the pleasant mingling of the song and the rain, and the blacksmith’s lusty blows with which the composition opens, to the complete tune as it is given out by the full orchestra at the close. The overture has only one fault; it is far too short.

Besides the pieces we have mentioned, the programme on Thursday contained a charming series of selections from Weber’s ‘Euryanthe,’ (newly made this season); the Andante Cantabile, from Liszt’s arrangement of the familiar Beethoven trio in B flat, originally written for piano, violin, and ‘cello, and the usual variety of more or less familiar pieces.”