RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 187, 22 January 1943, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

(No, 40: By

Marsyas

cords from the 20th century volume of the Columbia History of Music may have been an acknowledgment of my suggestion that this source should be further tapped-or perhaps it is my fault that I have never seen any of them in the programmes before. It is noteworthy, however, that though the programme was called "Modern Music," it was confined to Debussy, Ravel, Elgar and Mahler, and as I have said before, it is some years Now since Punch sighed for "the good old tunes of Strauss and Debussy." Varése, Haba, and Casella still await the familiarity of the New Zealand audience, I fancy, and their contributions to this notable collection of modern exemplars would excite a good deal of interest. * % 3 HE Debussy piece, taken from Six Epigraphes Antiques, but wrongly named in the programmes as the whole set, is an ear-tickling sample of that composer’s piano style; the Ravel song, bearing substantially the same name as a Mozart opera (The Enchanted Flute), and belonging to a song-set named Scheherezade, is guaranteed to deceive any ear familiar with Tchaikovski into thinking at first that it is Swan Lake. It is a sensitive though somewhat Pucciniish setting of a poem by Tristan Klingsor. If Percy Scholes selected Sospiri as truly typical of Elgar, he may be suspected of malicious irony. The programme closed with a Mahler song, a proof of the lush abundance of his melodic gifts. Since Mahler’s songs may conceivably be worth more to us than his Ninth Symphony, it would be interesting to have a programme of them S TATION 2YA’s broadcast of re-

equal in length to that monster work. Here’s a case where our performers could be commissioned to a set purpose, I don’t know of any other records of Mahler songs (except half a 10-inch side of an old Elisabeth Schumann disc), but there is at least one large collection of Mahler songs in New Zealand from which a branch of the Music Teachers’ Association presented a whole programme. It would be a help to the studio programmes in general if someone could be posted to attend all such concerts and scout out valuable or unusual programme material. Many things hitherto unheard might then find their way to the radio audience, Such a scout would be able to report not merely on the nature of the items and their performance, but also on the audience’s reception of them, which would be a further guide, % * x ‘THE reason why those other oddities of modern music with all their -isms and -alities should be put on the air is not similar to the reason why there should be more late Beethoven quartets and Haydn symphonies. The need for them arises out of the way in which other modern works, of the notorious kind, are currently misjudged. One’s whole impressions of, say, Jacques Ibert, or Walter Piston, may be retrospectively readjusted on hearing a piece of Edgar Varése’s noise-music, Casella’s "Tarantelle" or Alois Haba’s two-violin piece in sixth-tones. At present, Modern Music tends to be represented on the air by the hollow shams, the notorieties, whose faults would be exposed by the broadcasting of the more ingenuous novelties from which the sensational qualities have been detached and copied by inferior composers of works which render "modernity" in the letter but not the spirit.