REAL CHAMBER MUSIC

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 168, 6 October 1927, Page 16

REAL CHAMBER MUSIC

ON ORIGINAL INSTRUMENTS DOMESTIC MUSIC MAKING The Third Haslemere Musical Festival began recently at Surrey with a concert of Bach’s works performed on the instruments for which they were written. That is the principle of the festival —to present the music of the 16th, 17fh and 18th centuries as nearly as may be with the original effect. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made a life-long study of antique musical instruments, and his talented family are the founders and principal executants of the festival. The concert began with Bach’s great D Minor Concerto. It was played on harpsichord, ! violins and viols. It was stated that to ears accustomed to the powerful modern instruments on which it is commonly played, it sounded like the ghost of the famous work, but one quickly grew accustomed to the reduced scale. It was indeed chamber music, and one realised that most of what is generally called chamber music is not that at all. True chamber music has been lost, and what is called by that name is really concert music, aggressive and showy. PIANO'S ANCESTOR The Dolmetsch performance of such a work as the I) minor concerto is not a condemnation of the use of modern instruments, but what the Dolmetsch idea does prove is the out-and-out superiority of the quiet old instruments for domestic music-making. The harpsichord, the viol, and particularly the clavichord are instruments for the home. You can play the clavichord in the drawing-room without the dining-room knowing anything about it, and the misery that piano-playing inflicts on neighbours would be abolished if pianists took up, instead, that instrument’s aristocratic ancestor.