RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 182, 18 December 1942, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

= (No. 41.

By

Marsyas

HAT should a radio-programme \ , / reviewer do when his radio goes wrong? Condemned to musicless leisure, he is just as much embarrassed as that kind of listener would be who ordinarily turns the set on at 6 a.m. and leaves it on till bedtime. Such has been my misfortune this week, and in the search for something else to write about I naturally turned to the correspondence columns, which have been providing a diversion. But they were not fruitful. I might have been able to join issue with the resentful "New Education" if he had raised musical matters as points of difference, but since he confined himself to chastising my personal character, it is not for ‘me to engage in the discussion. Another writer, "Bayonet", who had spent three leave-nights seeing Disney’s Fantasia, was horrified at my comments, and no, wonder; seeing that he read them so carelessly He quoted me as saying "Stokowski did not understand the music from the outset." The printed sentence read: "They just did not understand etc," and the they plainly referred to "Disney’s men" seven lines above. * * * ‘THE correspondents having proved so barren, I implored a friend, who likes British music for what he calls its "com-

monsense," to let me hear again the William Byrd five-part Mass. Now this work was immediately followed by a ballet suite by Lord Berners, "The Triumph of Neptune", and Byrd-Berners is a juxtaposition quite as startling as that one which a popular pocket magazine once made, with a photo of Mr. Neville Chamberlain facing a photo of an ostrich, or emu, or somesuch. It was also a very significant juxtaposition, but in this case because there is no likeness whatever beyond the name-syllables. From the vast heavenly ceiling of Byrd’s music, encompassing nobility beyond small men’s reach, we were thrown down among the tawdry playthings. of Lord Berners, this aristocratic pupil of Igor Stravinsky, the musical jeweller. If the music is parody, it needs explanation, which is a weakness (Walton’s parodies need none). Certainly that curious interpolation of a voice gasping "Home Sweet Home" awaits an enlightening annotation compiled from the ballet libretto. The suite displays brilliant-that is to say, flashy-orchestration, but I imagine that honest listeners prefer their Stravinsky straight, if at all, to an un-Brit-ish British substitute, much the same as epicures no doubt prefer unobtainable French liqueurs to Australian substitutes, or as other persons prefer their William Saroyan in the original to-well, never mind whom.