MUSICAL CRITICISMS OF THE PRESS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3204, 5 October 1881, Page 4

MUSICAL CRITICISMS OF THE PRESS.

Sussex musical criticisms in our local papers have also at times afforded me considerable amusement, mixed with astonishment. The quaint conceits which occasionally are printed are sometimes simply uncorrected mistakes of compositors who cannot decipher the manuscripts sent to them ; at other times they are mistakes made consciously by persons who must know that they are going out of their way to show their ignorance. What else can be said of the following criticism of Pinsuti's impassioned part-song, " The sea bath its pearls ?" " The next piece was ' The sea hath its perils,' which brought to mind vivid recollections of the Handel Festival. Probably all that the ■writer meant was to show his readers that he had heard '" Israel in Egypt" at the

Handel Festival, and and that he remombei'ed something about " the horse and his rider being thrown into tLf sea," but his conscience ought to have pricked him when he wrote that this thought was si '.rested by Pinsuti's music and " The sea Lath its pearls." To any musical reader who knows the "St. Paul," the choruß, "How lovely are the messanger !" will be familial', though he might be fairly pardoned for not recognising it under the title " How lonely are the passengers,'* attributed to it by the Sussex newspaper critic. But perhaps the perversion to which, in tho elegant La f ,inity of the of the same paper, " the appropriate motto. ' Palmer gui feral mural?" may be applied, is the following description of Stevens's well-known glee, " The cloud-capt towers ;" "Then followed a glee, The Cloud,' Capt. Towers " Capt. Towers was printed as the performer's, and not the composer's name, ao that the confusion was complete. It was in a north country, and not a paper that I once rend " Andante—a minor sympathy—Mendelssohn," as one of the pieces perfarmed at a concert. —Leisure