RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 185, 8 January 1943, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

[i (No. 44:

By

Marsyas

HANDFUL of New Year resoluA tions for NBS use, with good wishes to any who may have it in their power to effect them: (1) To aim more constantly at design in the content of musical programmes in general, as opposed to present anarchy, exemplified by inordinate repetition of familiar works and by such occasions as the recent one when the 3YA and 4YA orchestras did the same mysterious ballet ("My Lady Dragonfly’ — Finck), on consecutive nights. Time should be distributed among available works with some regard to their musical value; this would only require some thoughtful control. (2) jCognate with that suggestion, the NBS to requisition choral works from our amateur societies; parts to be located, borrowed, and forwarded (for hire), to societies not owning the ones needed; the NBS thereby inaugurating a much-needed service-a central bureau, pooling Dominion resources of partmusic and much enlarging the scope of each executant group; societies to have the right of declining nominated works, of course, but some attempt to be made to secure repeat performances of rarelyheard works,

(3) To revise all annotations held in stock, eliminating errors and fulsome praise of works which had hostile contemporary audiences, but which are offered to us with assurances that we (in our enlightened days of loudspeakers and arm-chairs), know better than to hiss. (4) To keep faith with great composers and keep abreast of modern research by correctly attributing misattributed compositions on the excellent example of 4YO, which recently gave "Haydn’s" ’Cello Concerto in D its real composer — Kraft, a pupil of Haydn, Other titles affected: "Purcell’s" Passing By: "Mozart's" Wiegenlied: Kreisler’s many "fakes." (5) Not to spoil programmes planned on a unity basis by using both sides of the record, regardless of the suitability of the odd side. (6) To avoid the pre-position, in announcements, of the performer to the composition or the composer, resulting in such absurdities as "We now present Samson and the Dijon. Cathedral Choir in excerpts from Missa Assumpta Est- . by Palestrina." It cultivates a bad habit in listeners to put artists before composers, causing them to remember immortal things by the names of men of transitory fame.