MUNICIPAL BAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 33, 2 May 1927, Page 13

MUNICIPAL BAND

AN OPERATIC PROGRAMME A large audience was attracted, to the Town Hall on Saturday night, when the Municipal Band gave a programme of transcriptions from, opera. The band, under Mr. Christopher Smith’s direction, played always efficiently but not always artistically. • Its chief number, the march from "“Fidelio,” did not represent Beethoven at his greatest; but even the second best, or third best, of the master is far more rewarding than most of the music one hears in Auckland. Another work of some interest, not comparable, of course, with Beethoven, was the overture to Verdi’s “I Vespri Siciliani,” an early, almost forgotten, opera. Sensational and hyper-operatic, as all Verdi’s “wild oats,” it is still effective in its way, and would be more effective with a little judicious cutting. The band played also a “grand selection” from “Cavalleria Rusticana,” and a mere “selection” from “The Maid of the Mountains,” but the one was not really much grander than the other. Some of “Cavalleria” was rather curiously scored in this arrangement. Who would expect the “Siliciana,” which we have heard from three generations of perfervid Italian tenors, to be voiced by the grave French horn? Mr. Fred Bowes played a cornet solo, “Souvenir de Bellini” (Hoch). It takes the finest art of the finest singer, a Frieda Hempel or a Battistini, to revive our interest in Bellini’s melodies; and the cornet seems, of all vehicles, the least suited to their faded charms. This illegitimate son of the noble trumpet should never be heard as a solo instrument. Yet another novelty was the “Miserere” from “II Trovatore,” in an arrangement for clarinet and cornet, played by Major T. H. MaJoy and Mr. Fred Bowes. Miss Alma McGruer has a most agreeable voice, and sings with more than common intelligence. Her high notes are not quite free, and her enunciation is not always clear in English or correct in Italian. But these are matters easily to be remedied and Miss McGruer may be expected to do some really good work after furtherexperience and development. Mr. Arthur Ripley extracted the last drops of sentiment form the “Maritana” songs, “Let Me Like a Soldier Fall” and “There is a Flower That Bloometh”; and later Miss McGruer and Mr. Ripley sang a d.uet from the same preposterous old work. This opera seems to represent the uttermost dregs of Victorian art; it is far less moving than “East Lynne,” far less ingenious and beautiful than the waxen fruit and antimacassars of that period. But it has not j'.et lost its appeal to a section of the public. R.J.B.