THE MUSICAL WORLD

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 81, 29 December 1934, Page 7

THE MUSICAL WORLD

(By

“C.J.M.”)

Stray Notes. Ernest McKinlay, the well-known New Zealand tenor, who had been an inmate of the Randwick Military Hospital for the past seven weeks, is now convalescent. Mr. McKinlay was formerly a member of the Digger Entertainers and the Westminster Glee Singers. * * * Horace Stevens, the Australian baritone singer who toured New Zealand with Left. Pouishnoff, the pianist, was married in Melbourne recently to Mrs. Ella Hallam. For eight years Mrs. Hallam designed her own houses, bought her timber supplies, and personally supervised 'the erection of cottages and flats. The depression, however, caused her to turn her business ability in other directions, and lately she has undertaken the supervision of pastoral properties in Victoria and New South Wales on behalf of absentee owners. As Mrs. Horace Stevens, she proposes to continue her supervision of the pastoral properties, but the building of houses will not enter again into her life —until times are very much better. ¥ $ * A new work by Vaughan Williams, a suite for viola and orchestra, will be played by Lionel Tertis (to whom it is dedicated) at the Couitauld-Sargent concerts on Monday and Tuesday. The work, which is scored for small orchestra, consists of eight short pieces in three groups as follows: —1., Prelude, Carol, Christmas Dance; 11., Ballad, Moto Perpetuo; 111., Musette, Polka, Gallop.

Leopold Stokowski has put into practice at the concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra an interesting idea which might perhaps And supporters here. The idea is to hold after each concert a short public rehearsal of a new composition of out-of-the-way interest. A note in the programme invites those who are not curious to go quickly and quietly, for the sake of those who stay on and the “quiet atmosphere that b necessary for the hearing of music that is sometimes delicate and subtle.” The practice is for one or two reasons less suitable to London than Philadelphia, where programmes are much shorter than here, and where the principal concert of the week takes place not at night but in the afternoon. But this way of giving a foretaste of a new composition certainly has its attractions. Memories of Delius. ’ Percy Grainger’s memories of Delius, published in the “Australian Musical News,” describe aspects of the composer known only to a small circle, Delius’s music is aloof and dreamy, but the composer was, with his friends, “delightfully saucy, argumentative, and mischievous.” “He was alive with a Voltaire-like wit and thrust, eager to tease, and in all ways shrewdly selfprotective.”

Delius is described as caring nothing for Haydn or Beethoven, detesting Brahms, and making great fun of the “Mozart cult,” saying, “If a man tells me he likes Mozart I know in advance he’s a bad musician.” Modern French music for him was, in his own words, “simply Grieg, plus the third act of ‘Tristan.’ ” It was impossible to interest him in Strauss or Stravinsky. Sehonbergianism he called “the wrongnote craze,” and when some Hindemith was played to him he burst in with “I only know one thing: that composer has a vulgar soul, ‘eine gemeine Seele.’ ” He never varied in his admiration for Bach, Chopin, Wagner and Grieg. During his illness he was attended by a succession of German male nurses, members of a Lutheran brotherhood, who were bound by vows to engage in self-sacrificing work. Delius, however, “never dreamed of refraining from s'pouting his usual atheistical tirades against Christianity, and strove manfully to undermine their religious beliefs.”

Operatic Music. It is interesting to notice some remarks made by the well-known English musical writer, Herbert T. Foss, in hid recently-published book, “Music in My Time.” He attributes the decline in patronage of opera all over the world to the fact that the operatic stage is out of touch with the “legitimate” or dramatic stage. "The assumption that a singer of opera will be an actor of opera,” he says, “is made with unreasoning carelessness. The stage manager is asked to be an easy person of traditional knowledge rather than a stage-hand drilled into being a specialist in a dually complicated art. The producer is employed as one who knows opera not as one who has had ordinary experience on the stage, . .. Always the opera house prides itself on being the asylum of music. If it were to be the asylum of drama first, and so allow the progress in modern dramatic art to enter therein, it would, I believe, attract a new and greater audience.” These remarks by Mr. Foss will appeal with added force to people who have seen opera perfectly acted, as well as heard it beautifully sung—at the Residenz Theatre in Munich, for example, where Mozart is done with marvellous delicacy of detail.