Composer Reviles Australian Music

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 350, 10 May 1928, Page 14

Composer Reviles Australian Music

PERFORMANCES PITIFUL MELBA’S EMPHATIC RETORT “Australia is a large island put on the map by an opera singer. It is likely to be wiped out by the folly of its inhabitants.” In an article, composed in the above strain, Maurice Besly, an English composer and teacher, reviles Australia in an English musical newspaper. “Australians are by nature musical,’' he writes. “But they have no standard, no musical taste, and their orchestral performances are pitiful. “Heinze is doing good work in Melbourne, but it will be years before his orchestra is even second rate. UNWORTHY OF THEIR HIRE “1 am sorry for Godfrey Smith, Frank Hutchens, Rita Coonan and Fritz Hart, who are marooned on a desert island. "No musician should go to Australia, except for health reasons.” Mr. Besly adds that, in his opinion, no Australian-made article is firstrate, because the workmen are never worthy of their hire. “I hope that the association will send a cable to Maurice Besly stating that his insulting remarks are a damned lie,” said Dame Nellie Melba, at a dinner given by the New South Wales Musical Association. Dame Nellie said: “A certain Maurice Besly has seen fit to pass insulting remarks on the musical standards of the Commonwealth, and he sympathised with a number of leading Australian musicians who, he said, were marooned on the ‘desert island’ of Australia. “I and these other musicians are delighted to be marooned on this ‘desert

island,* providing that Mr. Maurice Besly is not here with us,” said Melba. Then she hoped the musical association of New .'Touth Wales would send the cable message mentioned. She would also like to see a box of pills sent to this Maurice Besly, for she felt sure his liver was entirely out of order. He is talking like a disappointed man, commented Mr. Arundel Orchard. :crom London. Mr. Frank Hutchens, in Sydney, goes further. “Such comment is disgraceful,” he says. “We are doing —ery well, and I don’t feel at all marooned, nor does my friend, Godfrey Smith.” WILD VAPOURINGS Maurice Besly arrived in Sydney a couple of years ago as exarryner for the Associated Board,” states F. E. 8., in the “Sydney Guardian.” He examined—and fussed a great deal, especially about some of his orchestral compositions, the one best remembered being “A Chelsea China.” He is really no judge of Australia’s musical—or national —taste, for he was a typical tourist, a Foster Fraser of musical travel. At the Conservatorium here, he conducted the orchestra in one of his arrangements of a suite of Bach, and he examined people. “If Australia were the musical desert described by Besly, then we would not have had Kreisler, Backhaus, Friedman, Heifetz, Moiseiwitsch, or a dozen other celebrities of sound. His article is wild vapouring—and should be read with a smile.”