Friday afternoon, in Symphony Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Mr. Pierre Monteux opened its forty third season, starting off, as is this year's fashion, with Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, wading through the Brahms-Hayden variations, climbing over "La Perl" of Dukas, to the voluptuous heights of the dance of Salome, from Richard Strauss's opera of like name.

It is perhaps a commonplace, but in any case worthy of repetition, that Mr. Monteux is particularly successful in music of or relating to the dance; that he finds grateful any bit which he can visualize. Conspicuous was yesterday's program, headed by the Seventh Symphony aptly, we think, dubbed by Wagner, "apotheosis of the dance"; and continuing through more specific apotheoses as conceived by Dukas and Strauss. Conspicuous also was Brahms, conspicuously dull and and diffuse, the one dry spot on an otherwise attractive program.

Lawrence Gilman has called the Seventh Symphony the "most beautiful symphony in the world." Others may and do disagree. But opinion is curiously uniform in praise of this symphony. It is Beethoven at his zenith, technical if not emotional. It is not a big symphony, big as are the third, the fifth or the ninth. It does not belong in or fit into the usual categories. It is unique, and uniquely fascinating. Mr. Monteux's version of it is as an ascending, expanding, dynamic thing, culminating in a veritable rhythmic orgy, was thoroughly logical; to some listeners it seemed that this is less an organic symphonic piece, than a suite of pieces. The first movement, for instance, retarded for this general effect, itself lost noticeably. It is, after all, a rippling thing, light and flowing, even as the third movement, and the only possible excuse for dragging it, the "logic of the larger lines", to be aliterative, Mr. Monteux had. Even so it did not wholly satisfy. It was in the symphony, too, that the orchestra shone least; a certain lack of brilliance, which is Mr. Monteux's major fault with the classics,--that lack which must necessarily accompany his extreme refinement, was overbalanced by the wood and brass.

The Brahms variations seemed very varied and very dull, inevitably recalling Huneker's simile of Brahms and the odor of new-mown hay.

The Dukas of "La Peri" is not at all the same as the composer of the "Sorcerer Apprentice". Most of the verve and originality of that gem are lacking, as is also a vital unity. There is a series of rather incoherent, aimless, not too interesting, wanderings.

For culmination, there was Strauss's dance of Salome, To him who has not heard this music, it seems inconceivable that the rather boisterous and broad humorist of "Tiel Eulenspiegel" or the Strong Superman of "Heldenleben" should be able even to approximate the essentially un-Teutonic, Wilde quality. That voluptuousness would seem hardly to be appreciated by an essentially broad and virle race; its subtleties would seem not for them. One hearing of the dance of Salome is convincing, however; rarely not even in the Tannhauser Bacchanale, has such voluptuousness been distilled into music.

For next week Mr. Monteux has chosen Rachmaninov's long and too familiar symphony, a Habanera of Aubert, and the overture to Smetana's "Bartered Bride": Mme Elizabeth Rethberg will sing arias from Wagner and Beethoven.