RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 161, 24 July 1942, Page 6

RECENT MUSIC

: No. 20.

By

MARSYAS

of my week’s listening was a recording of Artur Schnabel’s playing of Sonata in C Sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2, by Beethoven. There’s been more moonshine talked about this sonata than about any other composition, save perhaps Rachmaninoff’s prelude in the same key, and it was pleasant to think that someone may have been hearing it for the first time without being introduced to a misleading set of fake associations. . * % * 4 most noteworthy event UT William Walton’s symphony was less lucky. Several weeks ago slices were cut off two movements by someone who didn’t know that the record hadn’t finished. The other day it happened again. The scherzo reached bar 84, paused on the mediant, with eight bars (and three V-1 cadences) to go, and there was no more. Those who don’t know the Walton symphony, will understand when I explain that, if you played a record of Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel and took the needle off at the word kiss, you would get the same effect. aie whe

a = ~~ ‘THANKS to Yvonne Webb-Jones, I can now say that I have heard eight different compositions by Claudio Monteverdi, of which two have been sung by her from Wellington. Until recently my warm affection for this most agreeable musician had to thrive on a handful of records, and faint memories of a fragment included by Eric Korngold in his score for the film Anthony Adverse. Then Mrs. Webb-Jones sang Lasciatemi morire and I was grateful, but thought that her very dramatic style and powerful "expression" had seemed inappropriate. Knowing my Monteverdi chiefly from non-theatrical madrigalian compositions, I had imagined that ‘his music (wherein he was exploring the use of the discord as a source of expression) could be permitted to make its own impact without the extra weight of dramatic treatment. So I would like to have been able to hear this latest broadcast properly. Unfortunately, in order that other citizens might listen to Parliament, 2YA’s programme had to be carried by 2YC, and I still do not know whether my first impression would have been modified. * * * |F Archduke signifies true nobility then it is a more fitting name to denote Beethoven’s most noble trio than simply "in B Flat, Op. 97." In fact, it is a case where a purely circumstantial nickname (originating in the dedication) seems to have a more meaningful application than most of the names chosen by the aficionados of certain other famous works (see first par, above). The Archduke Trio is one of those rare works which, when I hear them, allow me to forget that I am listening to " chamber music." Perhaps all thanks are due to Cortot, Thibaud, and Casals, whose recording, perfect though old, is the one by which most of us know the work.

S the IYA orchestra being run on the lines of Moscow's communistic " Persimfans," the conductorless orchestra? No conductor is named in the programmes. But the Debussy Petite Suite went off well, much better than the Bach before it. And if the conductor was only Maelsek’s metronome, then I suppose the players alone are to be thanked. % * * * QOME great contemporaries’. was the name of an evening programme from an auxiliary station. Only one of the seven composers included is alive to-day (and we can’t be certain of him, now that Finland is an enemy country). Another of them (Smetana) died in 1884; but these weren’t the only things that made the programme interesting. Consider the manner in which some of © our Great Contemporaries met their deaths: Peter Warlock considerately put the cat out before turning on the gas; George Gershwin collapsed in Sam Goldwyn’s studio and died-tumour on the brain; Paul Dukas, in his last "lucid" moment burnt all his unpublished manuscripts, representing the work of about 25 years’ composing, so that, in effect, his death as a composer occurred about 1910; Smetana, deaf for some years, finally died in an insane asylum in Prague. Not exactly cheerful.