Besprechung des gestrigen Konzerts in The New York Times Nr. 21132 auf S. 11:

"               THE BOSTON ORCHESTRA.

Bruckner's Seventh Symphony and Beethoven's Violin Concerto.

     Dr. Muck made an unusual program for the second concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra which was given last evening in Carnegie Hall. It comprised only two numbers: Anton Bruckner's Seventh Symphony and Beethoven's concerto for violin, played by Fritz Kreisler. The symphony is long, lasting just over an hour. The audience listened with patience to this work of vast dimensions in length, breadth, and thickness, encouraged, no doubt, by the thought of what was to follow it.

     Dr. Muck played it here eight years ago, in his first term as conductor of the Boston Orchestra. He is a prophet of Bruckner, who has made extensive propaganda for his symphonies in Europe as well as in this country. So have many others of the most distinguished of modern conductors; and this fact should discourage hasty depreciation of Bruckner's works. Yet they have not hastily been depreciated here, though they have tried the endurance of the public for nearly a generation. When the Seventh Symphony was first played in New York some twenty-eight years ago it was considered excessively complicated, full of unintelligible couterpoint, forced harmonies, abstruse elaboration. The fifteen brass instruments used in it excited wonder and consternation. Its composer was regarded as bewilderingly "modern," with Wagnerian tendencies.

     His music now seems intelligible enough; it does not persistently ape the Wagnerian idiom, and what he is trying to convey is easy to understand. The trouble with Bruckner does not lie in that direction. It is evident that he was a creative force of undoubted power; but that he had little control, through self-criticism, of his work in symphonic development. Such development he had not mastered; and he had little feeling for the significance or the apt proportions of the symphonic form. The movements of this symphony seem like an elaborate series of genial experiments carried to wearisome lengths, with no certain foresight of the end and no inevitable progress toward that end. There are pages of grandiose and imposing power; passages that are as the large utterance of the early gods, poignant and searching, truly and finely felt.

     The opening passages of the first movement, and much in it that follows, have impressiveness; but there are here, as through the whole work, tiresome repetitions, dry and uninteresting details; and the end is a reminder, amusing today, of Bruckner's Wagnerian ardor, so closely does it paraphrase the final scene of "Das Rheingold." The slow movement, interminably and extravagantly prolonged though it is, has true nobility and in it finest moments a deep solemnity. If the succulent portions of the scherzo could be isolated from much husk, they would be enjoyed. The last movement is the weakest, inept in its material and dry in its pretentious learnedness.

     This strangely compounded work was heard with more apparent interest than at any previous performance of it here. The performance was superb, devoted on the part of both conductor and players; though some may have questioned whether the scherzo might not have gained by a livelier tempo. There was much applause after the slow movement, and at the end Dr. Muck was several times recalled, and, as he so often does, made his men rise to share the applause with him.

     Mr. Kreisler was most enthusiastically welcomed. He played Beethoven's concerto with the profound appreciation of its poetical beauties that has so often marked his performances of it before. It was the performance of a great artist who penetrates the spirit of Beethoven's work and who truly recreates ist." [keine Signatur] (*).

Eine Kritik erscheint auch in der New York Tribune Nr. 25219 auf S. 9, signiert "H. E. K." [= Krehbiel]:

"BOSTON'S ORCHESTRA BRINGS LENTEN GLOOM

     Dr. Muck chose a particularly unhappy time to reward the admiration which music lovers in New York feel for him and the Boston Orchestra by compelling them to do more than an hour's penance at the second of the evening concerts at Carnegie Hall last night. Lent is still several months distant, and if he thought that his admirers deserved punishment for the good of their souls, either morally or æsthetically, he might have held off Bruckner's symphony in E major till they were in a spirit when they felt that they needed or deserved chastening. As it was, they had to take it last night, and go through the perfunctory motions of approval after an hour half of which at least was unrelieved boredom, in order at the last to enjoy Beethoven's violin concerto and Mr. Kreisler's performance of it. Many years ago when the symphony was first performed at a concert of the Philharmonic Society under Theodore Thomas, the audience was frank enough to give expression to its opinion of the symphony by walking out of the Metropolitan Opera House in large Detachments after the second and third movements and going gloomily home after the last. That was not to be expected last night, because Mr. Kreisler was on hand to make amends for the affliction. He did–so far as he could–by a brilliant performance of the Beethoven concerto, a much more reposeful and musicianly one than he put to his credit the last time he played it here, and one that was thoroughly in the spirit of the composition, which sounded peculiarly stimulating after the monotonous pedantry of the Bruckner work.          H. E. K." (**).