Includes program.  “The garden is open every afternoon, without music.”

“The entertainment at the Hippodrome still attracts large audiences. The great building is prettily decorated and lighted, and the spectacle of a well-dressed crowd laughing, chatting, and moving about, is always interesting even if there were nothing else to amuse. Mr. Gilmore’s band furnishes a pleasant accompaniment for the promenade, and with its gay uniforms and glistening instruments adds a great deal of life and color to the picturesque scene. We do not suppose many people go to the Hippodrome merely, or even principally, for the sake of the music, and therefore the band perhaps ought not to be judged by a very high standard. As it puts forth considerable pretensions, however, and attempts some serious and difficult compositions, it may be as well to state the plain truth about it. A military band is never heard to advantage in-doors—not even in a large building like the Hippodrome. It is intended for performances in the open air. It uses only such instruments as can be conveniently played on the march or in the field. It is obliged to dispense with the most important, most expressive, and most beautiful portion of the orchestra, and to make shift as well as it can by transferring the work of the strings to a multitude of hautboys and other wind instruments of an entirely different character. Out of doors this is not so great a misfortune, because there the qualities of tone are not so easily distinguishable; but the military band in any case and under the best of circumstances is only a pis aller, --a substitute for something better. It never ought to be heard in the concert-room, unless in rare and exceptional circumstances, as in a descriptive battle piece like Beethoven’s Vittoria Symphony, where it is used as a supplement to the orchestra; and there is of course a great deal of the best music which it never ought to attempt anywhere. Mr. Gilmore does not admit this. He attempts ‘Lohengrin’ and ‘Tannhauser’ as confidently as a Strauss waltz or a soldiers’ march, and he makes a bad mess of them both, and would do little with them were his band much better than it is. But even as a military band it is not a very good one. Its tone is not rich, its execution is not clear, and it lacks the breadth of expression, the refinement, and the beautiful gradations of force which we admired so much in the French band upon which it is modeled. Nor is Mr. Gilmore, as it appears to us, likely to give his men what they need. In none of the important compositions which we have heard his band play was there a trace of sensibility in the interpretation, or any indication of the indefinable artistic instinct, which is one of the first requisites of a good concert conductor. There was a curious illustration of the deficiency of which we speak in the pot-pourri from ‘Lohengrin,’ the coarseness of which was so marked—coarseness of conception, we mean, rather than of execution—that at least one passage was very much as if the Knight of the Swan had gone marching with a target company. We have the less hesitation in speaking freely on these points because we believe there is an opportunity for Mr. Gilmore to make what we have never had in this country—a first-rate band for military purposes; and if he will devote himself to that work he will deserve our thanks. But a concert band is another thing.”