PIANO RECITAL

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22516, 26 September 1938, Page 9

PIANO RECITAL

PUPILS OF MADAME CHRISTINE

RAWLINGS /

In a recital of piano music at Chas. Begg and Company's rooms on Saturday afternoon, four pupils of Madame Christine Bawlings showed how completely musical pleasure can be expressed and communicated on levels of technical skill below that of professional performers. In part, this pleasure arose from a refreshing and successful choice of music seldom heard. Of more than 20 compositions played, only one, perhaps, is familiar in recital programmes, the posthumous valse of Chopin. Of the remainder, although Beethoven, Chopin again, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, for example, appeared among, them, the most assiduous concert-goer hardly l ever hears any. This may be illustrated by a short list. Margaret Broadhead played the Beethoven Sonata in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2; Peggy Foweraker played the Sonata in E flat, Op. 31, No. 3. The other Chopin items, by Cherry Campbell and Peggy Foweraker, were three of the mazurkas; Schumann was drawn upon for a charming, fluent Arabesque (Cherry Campbell); and the Mendelssohn work was* an. animated Hunting Song (Peggy Foweraker). Even Nancy Bell, at the age of nine, played two Beethoven trifles well worth hearing, an amusing Rondo and an "Albumblatt," which, by a pleasant chance, seems to offer in an elementary form the idea so splendidly developed in the last movement of the D minor. But the choice of programme, happily spread over diverse periods and styles of music, Rameau and Daquin, Bach and Haydn, Debussy and Ireland, could only give the players the right sort of opportunity to use. They used it delightfully well. Their playing was firm and positive, held the music to its shape and carried it through the journey of its purpose, and made it speak out, in the true accent of the composers. Scriabin had his voice and Character, as well as Ireland; and the contrast there is sharp enough to be taken as typical of a real success in musical discrimination and enjoyment. The last word is the most important. Each of these four pupils played with a clear delight in playing, intelligently, and without a trace of that anxious preoccupation over fingers and thumbs which is, often enough, all that young musicians seem to feel and convey.