RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 181, 11 December 1942, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

(No. 40: By

Marsyas

we know the work of Beethoven’s mature genius), is all too rarely admittéd to the New Zealand ether, and plenty of listeners would welcome a run through the last five quartets and the last five piano sonatas, perhaps on Sunday afternoons. Only after a careful watch for weeks did I discover in the programmes one of the quartets, the 15th, in A Minor, which was a pleasant surprise until I discovered that it was to be broadcast from 3ZR, and was no more likely to be heard in other parts of the Beethoven" (by which term country than a West Coast barman calling "Time, gentlemen, please!" The Grosse Fuge, on the other hand, seems to get on the air rather often, perhaps at the expense of other "late Beethoven," on the principle, no doubt, that "you’ve got to take that sort of _thing in small doses.’"’ The Grosse Fuge may have been "one of Beethoven’s most colossal conceptions" (Edwin Evans), but is it pleasant sound? It has the advantage of being only about 15 minutes long, and easily fitted into a programme, and it has a fancy title, but no programme organiser who really listened to it, and then to the C Sharp Minor or F Major Quartet, could ever be in any doubt about which one to put in a progtamme again,

HE 3YA String Orchestra is playing under that name, and, as it did last year, under Frederick Page. The guest conductor idea is a good one, and it is good to see that it is not forgotten, like the early works of young composers, after a trial. So far, the orchestra has done a Handel Concerto Grosso, the Mozart "A Little Night Music,’ Vaughan Williams’s Five Variants on "Dives and Lazarus," and so on, and the success of such a programme should stimulate further exploration into the rapidly growing field of music accessible to the string orchestra, Obviously our own musicians can rise above the confectionery department of musical "entertainment" (as exemplified by Poldini, Finck, and the rest), without over-reaching themselves as in a Beethoven symphony, and this should be the general policy. Es * * [N a context of suggestions, it may be fitting to ask when programmeorganisers will make more use of that very fine and easily-referred-to Columbia History of Music by Ear and Eye which Percy Scholes assembled with great care, providing records of many wonderful out-of-the-way pieces of music, and useful informative notes. A few are occasionally heard, some madrigals, and a few songs, but I have never heard the Monteverdi example or any of the pieces in the final or twentieth century volume (Milhaud, Casella, Stravinsky, Haba, Varése), some of which would make any listener grateful for Purcell.