RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 163, 7 August 1942, Page 10

RECENT MUSIC

No. 22;

By

Marsyas

6¢ HEY are now, under favourable conditions, almost up to recording standard" was the lavish praise bestowed on our local orchestras by a fairly recent correspondent of The Listener. It contains an idea that is perhaps too common, and which needs to be opposed: namely, that recorded music sets the standard we must ask for here. Performances which I have mentioned in this column — gq Mozart programme given under Andersen Tyrer, some of Thomas Matthews’ Auckland programmes, and now particularly these very fine performances by the NBS String Quartet, have reminded me of that remark, and have demonstrated how irrelevant is the comparison with recorded music. The ‘recording companies aim, for obvious reasons, at performances that

are utterly flawless. But however "perfect" a recorded performance might be, there is no escape from the fact that it is precisely the same every time you hear it. This may seem to be all right until you come up. against the fact that, in a local performance, the very influence that causes the slips-silly little mistakes and big blunders-is also the very thing that produces the master-touches-little glimpses of perfection, and broad visions of greatness. The man who said that architecture was "frozen music," however mistaken he may have been as to the nature of architecture, has perceived the essentially fluid quality of music, and no doubt knew the importance of finding something fresh in a piece of music with each new performance. * % * CURIOUS thing happens to a performer when he has an audience. The knowledge that the music must go on, whatever happens, brings into operation a set of controls that are not in use at rehearsal time.

In this way, the strange things happen that make a fresh local performance preferable to a familiar recorded one (given intelligent sincere musicians, of course), whether it is "under favourable conditions" or not. Recording standard is set by men who have played fiddles, clarinets, or horns all their lives, whose fathers and brothers did, too, perhaps; who have not had to drive vans, keep ledgers, serve customers, or snip tickets, in order to live. It is not desirable that our kind of musician should be expected to do what the other kind can do. What is desirable is that one day it might be possible for our musicians to live in the same way as those others. ES * * BY invitation of the Czechoslovak Consul I listened to a programme called "The Music of Czechoslovakia." It came from 2YC, and conditions were so favourable that I heard it a good deal more plainly than plenty of things I’ve listened to over 2YA. Shortly before 8 p.m. I tuned in, and began to wonder (Continued on next page)

RECENT MUSIC (Continued trom previous page) by what feat of prestidigitation I might hear 2YC’s opening announcements and some Scarlatti played by the 3YA Orchestra at one and the same moment. The Czechs solved it for me by starting their concert late, so I was able to enjoy a moment or two of Julius Harrison’s arrangement of some Scarlatti sonatas (including that one which, as a piano solo, is too well known). But I dallied too long on this part of the dial, and missed one of 2YC’s announcements, finding on my return that the string quartet was playing our National Anthem. It was refreshing by way of a change to hear the tune in this medium. Stripped of its associations with impatient cinema crowds, it is all the more plainly a grand tune. + * * Then followed two more tunes, a slow one and a quick one, the first of which was, I think, Kde Domov Muj, the

Czech anthem. The Czech of 1942 might well ask himself "Where is my home?" The second was presumably a Slovak tune. But whereas, perhaps foolishly, I had hoped for @ quick glance over a few Bohemian folk tunes, with maybe one or two things by Janacek, Novak, or Suk, that I had never heard, I found that all the rest of the broadcast time was

taken up with Smetana’s first biographical quartet, a work that does not seize my imagination very vividly. Perhaps difficulty of obtaining parts limited the choice somewhat. But the quartet was well played; I remember particularly the middle section of the second movement, and those frightening tremolos near the end of the finale.