RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 162, 31 July 1942, Page 10

RECENT MUSIC

_ No. 21

By

Marsyas

AST week was more than , ordinarily generous with studio broadcasts of special interest. The one I call to mind first was a very successful performance by the NBS String Quartet of the Schubert Quartet in A Minor, Op. 29. They had put a lot of work into polishing up this work, or else they are just plain good players, because the music moved with great fervour. The sublime calm of the andante was communicated by means of utterly relaxed playing, and then the last two movements seemed to be lifted bodily off the stave. The news that there would be a further broadcast by the quartet made the amnnouncer’s voice welcome, even after such music. Bs 8 ae (COLIN TAYLOR, a distinguished visitor who has come from South Africa to examine for the ‘Royal Schools of Music, played Debussy from 2YA on a Sunday afternoon. Mr, Taylor is known in New Zealand through his songs, which are more than mere pedagogue’s music, and his playing of pieces from Estampes, Images and the Preludes was imaginative. I felt at the time that there is something about these ‘pieces that makes them more appro‘priate to the afternoon than to the night; perhaps something to do with Debussy’s "impressionist" conception of tonal "light." It would be interesting to have Mr. Taylor’s, opinion on the problems of acclimatising music in another country where musical background is no older than the houses the people live in.

be of [tT must be nearly a year since I heard the Castles on the air in one of their programmes of "early" (i.e. 16th, 17th and 18th century) instrumental music. In last week’s programme they made Giles Farnaby, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and Corelli come to life, to say nothing of "Mr. Isaac’s Maggot," which we had been warned to expect (in the Things to Come page), and which turned out to be nothing more objectionable than "a whim or fanciful idea." (Speculation might also be aroused by ofher pieces of nearly the same period: The New Sa-hoo, Up tails all, Malt’s come down and Wolsey’s Wilde for instance, or Couperin’s Les Culbutes Ixcxbxnxs and Le tic tic choc.) se a * HE virginals which Ronald Castle . played give you some idea of what Elizabethan composers had to make the best of. It’s not surprising that Byrd wrote: "There is not any musicke of instruments whatsoever, comparable to that which is made of the voices of men, where the voices are good, and the same well sorted and ordered." Ronald Castle played tastefully, and got as much out of the instrument as one can expect. Those who had heard a strange instrument known as the calliope may have thought the combination of treble and descant recorders sounded rather like it, but that mustn’t spoil the enjoyment

of such merry piping. One player had prodigious breath at times, and in fact for a moment (in the Carman’s Whistle variations), I wondered whether the recorder, like the calliope, was being played with steam! Ronald and Zillah Castle have found out something which the Dolmetsches seem to have missed. They play with evident enjoyment, and that, much more than historical sense, is the essential thing. When it is present in addition to historical sense, then you couldn’t ask for more. a % % | STILL find Dr. V. E. Galway’s session "Masterpieces of Music’ (4YA, alternate Mondays), one of the best of the special musical features. He makes the Moussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition sound much more convincing than they sound without his help. By that I mean simply that I’m not prepared to accent a tune in a certain mode and a certain rhythm as the musical representation of a picture of a cart (or two Jews), any more than I'd accept a picture of a cart (or two Jews), in certain colours and shapes, as a pictorial illustration of some piece of music. fe * * T is painful to have to point out that a ZB programme "Music of the Masters," which I recently praised, has been followed by others that are simply deplorable. A recent Schumann programme gave us Robert and Clara having tiffs over the Carnaval pieces. "Do it sound like that, Robert?" asks Clara, at one moment, and then: "What’s the next piece?" "Botterflies, my deer," answers Robert. The voice gave me the feeling that they would have sounded the same whether the Schumanns were French, Czech, Russian, or Italian. The worst possible recordings, scratchy and dull, provided the musical illustrations, which were curtained ruthlessly at inappropriate points.