Central Park Garden Concert

“The Symphony on Thursday was Raff’s ‘Im Walde,’ whose popularity during the two or three years it has been known to our audiences seems to have slowly but steadily increased. In some respects—in compactness for instance, in picturesque variety, and in freedom of treatment—the ‘Lenore’ Symphony we think surpasses it; but the ‘Forest’ Symphony has a great advantage in its plan of structure. It does not attempt either to depict a scene or to tell a story; it merely suggests the sensations which the woods with their ever changing music awaken in our bosom. What Beethoven wrote at the head of his Pastoral Symphony, Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei, Raff might have adopted as the motto for his ‘Im Walde.’ It is an expression of feeling rather than a picture; and even the Dryads’ Dance, which takes the place of the regulation Scherzo, and the third movement with its supernatural business of Frau Holle and the Huntsmen hardly come under the designation of programme music, and certainly are not more open to objection than the cuckoo which Beethoven introduced into his Sixth Symphony. Raff at any rate is one of the few living symphonists in whose works we always find interest and satisfaction. He is almost always fresh and graceful, and he is rarely dull.

Of the other compositions played on Thursday night, the most noticeable were [see above], and a ‘Prelude and Fugue,’ adapted from Bach by J. I. Abert, Capellmeister at Stuttgardt, and author of several important works, including a ‘Columbus’ overture which Mr. Thomas produced some years ago in Brooklyn. The present adaptation is a composite structure in three parts: the first is Prelude No. 4 from Bach’s ‘Wohltemperirte Clavier;’ the second a Choral by Abert himself, scored for trumpets, horns, and trombones only, and received on Thursday with something like rapture; and the third is the organ fugue in G minor, No. 12 of the second set in Jahrgang 15, in the course of which the choral is introduced again by the bass instruments.”