The Metropolitan Opera Company, as its opening offering for the 1940 radio season, will revive Mozart's Marriage of Figaro on Saturday afternoon. If everything goes as well as it did last year when the opera was played, Saturday afternoon should be a treat, something to stay home and hug the radio for. Except for a tendency toward low comedy in their productions last year, the Met put on as delightful a performance of Mozart as any within memory. 'The Marriage of Figaro, of course, in its original form was Beaumarchais' virulent satire on the French nobility.' If Da Ponte, Mozart's incompetent librettist, had not emasculated Beaumarchais' play of all its social satire, until it was nothing but lace and frills, we might have a more cogent piece of drama. Even as it is, Mozart's score is so wonderfully expressive and dramatic that of itself it creates vital characters where there are nothing but wooden-heads in the libretto.

This week marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of Sibelius, in accord with which concert-halls and airwaves this week-end will fairly ooze Sibelius music. At Symphony Hall Friday and Saturday, Koussy is playing, all on one program, the Second, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies. This is a great opportunity to go and hear typical works from Sibelius's early and mature periods, to observe how he develops in craftsmanship, how compact and close-textured, for example, is the Seventh Symphony alongside the diffuse Second, and how much more purified, without loss of strength, are the themes of the sixth compared to those of the earlier symphony. Saturday night, again, Toscanini is doing (in addition to the Second Symphony) two of Sibelius's better known tone-poems, Pohjola's Daughter and The Swan of Tuonela. This is a chance to hear two shorter masterpieces, each impressive, but in entirely different ways: The Swan being a quiet, meditative mood-piece with little excitement, and Pohjola's Daughter being a volcanic orchestration of an old Scandinavian myth.

Sibeliophiles may find impressive the incidental music to Belshazzar's Feast, recorded on Victor for the first time by Robert Kajanus and the London Philharmonic (M715). I find it intolerably labored and mediocre. A self-conscious stab at the sort of exotic orchestral coloring one finds in Rimsky-Korsakoff, Belshazzar's Feast purports to describe scenes at an eastern potentate's court. The first and last movements, "Oriental Procession" and "Khadra's Dance," are nothing but meaningless jumbles of sound, with no melodic interest whatsoever and very little success in evoking any imaginative picture. The middle two movements, "Night" and "Solitude," in which the writer of the leaflet professed to find a "softly vibrant sensuousness," reminded me of some third-rate movie-score hacking out a scene from the garden of Allah or the sultan's harem. The Orchestra under Kajanus performs superbly, but its efforts are pretty well wasted.