RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 186, 15 January 1943, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

— (No. 45:

By

Marsyas

adian composers, recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under Sir Adrian Boult, was broadcast recently by 2YA. Violet Archer’s overture Britannia opened it. Unfortunately it seems that by some mistake half the orchestra had the wrong parts on their desks-those of a well-known, but un-well-loved overture by William Walton. The result, a raucous cacophony and most unladylike. It might be described as Portsmouth Point without the point. Marching Tune for strings, by Hugh Bairncroft, a Winnipeg organist, is quite a passable contrapuntal exercise on a not very distinguished tune. A_ brassy Rondo for orchestra by Barbara Pentland, lacking clarity both of purpose and of execution, suffered a rueful fate-the BBC's recording developed a fault, and the 2YA operator was forced to fade it down and bring on the next commentary. The temptation to do this must have been present long before the needle reached the crack. Godfrey Ridout’s Ballade for Viola and Strings approached the opposite pole, of euphonious pleasantry. It is pleasant to hear, and an imaginative melodic inverition is developed in the solo passages. John Weinsweig’s The Enchanted Hill, based on a poem by Walter de la Mare, draws on much colourful material for brass instruments, but the whole effect is that of the familiar style of film music rather than what one would imagine de la Mare might hope for, Of Healy Willan, whose A PROGRAMME of music by Can-

choral-orchestral setting of The Trumpeter by Alfred Noyes brought the programme to a clangorous end, I would ask whether, after all, one kind of Noyes was not enough? It would have been more encouraging to feel that these Canadian composers (some of them young) were denying themselves some things rather than greedily helping themselves to all the thousands of new pigments, patterns, and perspectives which modern experimental composers have made accessible -inventions which may seem at the first glance to be vast in extent and variety, but which may in fact be as limited in their scope as were the resources of the most poorly endowed periods musical history has known. * x * FROM 2YA the tenor W. ‘Roy Hill carefully chose and _tastefully sang a group of English songs, from Morley to the younger Arne, one a 16th century song on words generally ascribed to Ann Boleyn. The Tecital as a whole was almost beyond reproach, since Mr. Hill is a singer who is not afraid to lay his whole self at the disposal of the composer and poet of whatever he sings; and given a voice like Roy Hill’s, the song will do the rest. If any fault were to be found, it would be the accompanist, who failed to follow the singer through his sensitive changes of mood. The parts were not clear in the Morley, and even trills were bumbled in the Arne setting of Come Away Death. ue Ed * Misprint last week: "Mysterious ballet" should have been "meretricious ballet".