Central Park Band Concert

Includes program.

“To see Gotham’s chief heart, the unrivalled Park, in all its glory, go there on a Saturday afternoon in the summer.  Certainly the way thither is by no means desirable when the thermometer ranges beyond eighty degrees in the shade.  If you run the gauntlet of the cars on any of the avenues you are transported from the broiling street into what might be called a miniature Charon’s boat, with the difference of crossing Phlegethon instead of the Styx.  Intolerable heat, dubious odors from baskets of Limburger cheese, salad in an advanced stage of decomposition, villainous sausages and other sweet-smelling edibles, the jargon of Teutonic and other tongues know only to the speakers, the pleasure of being slowly martyred by hanging on to the straps of the car with a boot of the Dunderberg order planted on each of your aching corns, and the Job-like consolation of the conductor, ‘move forward, gentlemen,’ when the Falstaffian personage immediately in front of you persists in squeezing you into the least possible amount of space, are a few of the pleasures in store for the carfarer.  But once released from this black hole of Calcutta on arriving at Fifty-ninth street, and once inside the beautiful Park, all miseries are forgotten in the contemplation of the treasures poured out so lavishly at this season by Dame Nature and her worthy protegies, the Park Commissioners.  Yesterday the walks were thronged with visitors to the concert which the new Park band, under the direction of Harvey R. Dodworth, promised them.  On the Mall the scene was picturesque.  The pagoda, with its array of brass and reed instruments, including of course the thirty round white hats and the unmistakable stovepipe of the leader, was the shrine at which a motley crowd of music worshippers paid their devotions.  Outside, on the terrace, and above, on the ‘concourse,’ were carriages of every description.  The earnest attentions of the male occupants to the fair friends sitting beside them mingled curiously with the belligerent remarks of their Jehus, who mildly endeavored by objurgation and threat to persuade each other that tire carriages could not occupy the space intended by nature for one.  Below them, on the lake, were numerous boats making their usual rounds, while an excited individual at the first landing cried out, ‘Only ten cents a sail, gentlemen.’  A few swans and ducks (not crinolined, but web-footed) were congregated around the gloomy looking gondola, which, to use an Hibernian expression, ‘had seen better days and came of a decent family.’  It is now moored in the middle of the lake, as a kind of pensioned veteran, turned out to spend the remainder of his days in peace.  The gay bannerets waving over the laughing fountains and calm lake; the graceful architecture of the terrace and adjoining plaza, and the somber, Puritanic relic of the queen of the Adriatic, recalled memories of the bridge of sighs, the gondolier’s song, the dark dungeons beneath the waves, and the lions of St. Mark’s, that building whose bell tolled only at the recurrence of some public calamity.  On the myriad walks branching off from the Terrace to the Ramble were the victims of Cytherea’s mischievous little urchin, Dan Cupid.  The passion-breathing lips of the infatuated swan, and the bent head of his companion, with its realm of curls and other witcheries, the twitting songsters that poured forth their melodies from every branch, and the good-humored, sweating face of old Sol above, all paid homage to the genii of the Park—Love and Contentment.  At half-past three the warning roll of the drum announcing the opening of the concert, congregated around the queer-looking affair in which Mr. Dodworth and his compagnons were huddled every person within hearing.  Two or three of the Park police, clad in immaculate suits of gray, interrupted this opening piece—a march by Kühner—by frantic attempts to repress the boisterous merriment and acrobatic freaks of the inevitable small boy, who was ubiquitous on the occasion.  It was not a very serious loss, however, as the march was a rather disjointed and namby-pamby affair.  The magnificent overture to the Magic Flute, in which Mozart has interwoven his grandest with some of his most graceful thoughts, was given by the band with an effect that we hardly thought it was capable of producing. Wallace’s Amber Witch, one of his most beautiful creations, waved her wand in the second part of the programme, and succeeded in enchanting her hearers most effectually. Although hailing from the unromantic realm of Prussia, Wallace’s heroine has a sad and thrilling history. Falsely accused of being in league with the evil one on account of the riches accumulated by her and her father from the amber thrown on the shores of the Baltic, she suffers and dies to the usual ‘slow music,’ but of a nature that William Vincent Wallace alone of his contemporaries understood or felt. The other most remarkable piece played was Gungl’s exquisite ‘Dream on the Ocean’ waltz. There are some of the Park visitors who find fault with Mr. Dodworth’s selections in the Saturday concerts as being too dull and prosy. We can assure them that we have not heard at any other concerts in New York a more judicious mixture of classical, operatic and salon music. We decidedly object to the introduction of such popular pieces as ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp,’ ‘The Wearin’ of the Green,’ or ‘We are Marching On’ in these concerts. Some of the operatic selections are light and pleasing enough for any musical ear. During the concert, especially while the Amber Witch presided, the big drum and cymbals were very materially aided by a few angry claps of thunder, which, with an accompanying shower, caused a general stampede of the crowd around the stand. We quite unexpectedly found ourselves in the midst of a hundred Empress trails, tiny feet pattering on the sanded walk, and waterfalls, colls, curls, Derbys, mushrooms, sailors, &c., all ‘making tracks’ for the terrace and the Casino. But Jupiter Pluvius contented himself with a growl or two before the sun shone out more cheerily than before. There were not so many at the Park yesterday as on the previous days on account of the threatening rain. We should like to hear at one of those concerts the Doctor of Alcantara, a worthy physician, who has taken out his degree at the French theatre, and cures the blues and hypoechondria [sic] by copious doses of laughing gas. The melodies of this opera would be light enough for even the most fastidious of Mr. Dodworth’s hearers.”

“The Central Park Band played on Saturday the selection of music announced in our issue of that day. Even as it was, however, the cosmopolitanism of the New-York population was fairly represented, with a predominance of the American element, for—according to an American gentleman then and there present—it is ‘only the Americans that can afford to play the [gent?] at 3 o’clock of a week day afternoon.’  At the conclusion of Part I, it began to rain, and continued pretty heavily until the conclusion of Part II. This caused a general stampede in search of shelter, but the public not finding the shelter so convenient as desirable concluded they might as well be wet standing to hear the music as running half a mile to find cars, and returned.  The finest morceau of the programme was, to our mind, the Overture to the Pretender, by Kuchner [sic].  It is a sinfonia remarkable for the effective harmonic instrumentation of a rich, original melody.  With this piece our citizens have not had any opportunities of becoming familiar, and we are persuaded the public would thank Mr. Dodworth for repeating it.  The Overture of the Pretender and the five selections from the late Mr. Wallace’s Amber Witch were the pieces with which the public expressed themselves the most gratified. After listening for two hours with an interest in the subject which, especially under a heavy shower, we never saw equaled in a European capital, the assemblage dispersed—evidently imbued with the conviction that the music in Central Park is one of the successes of New-York civilization.”