Thomas Central Park Garden Concert: 6th

Includes program. 

“The warm weather, combined with the steadily increasing appreciation of good music which has been so marked in this community during the past few years, has drawn immense crowds to the Central Park Garden, so that the first week of the season has been one of unusual prosperity and promise. We notice a number of new faces in the orchestra, especially among the strings, but no difference is perceptible in the quality of the playing, and all the leading performers whose names are familiar to the public, such as Jacobssohn, Arnold, Eller, Kaiser, Dargel, Cappa, and others, remain in their accustomed places. Thomas has a large stock of fresh music, which he brings forward pretty rapidly. Besides the new ballet music of Gounod’s which we noticed on the opening night, the programmes of last week contained Westmayer’s ‘Kaiser Overture,’ which makes use of Haydn’s Austrian Hymn, and the overture to Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding of Camacho,’ never heard before, so far as we know, in the United States. The operetta to which this latter selection belongs was completed in 1825 when the composer was only 16 years old, and performed at Berlin in 1827. Mendelssohn’s genius had already asserted itself at that early period in a part of the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ music, and in the beautiful octet, but the ‘Hochzeit des Camacho’ was a failure and the most that can be said of the overture is that it is lively and well-made; we hear it with pleasure and have no difficulty in forgetting all about it afterwards. Among the most important of the familiar selections repeated last week were the whole of Schubert’s great symphony in C (No 9), transcriptions from ‘Lohengrin’ and ‘The Flying Dutchman,’ and the superb arrangement by Berlioz of Weber’s ‘Invitation to the Dance.’”