Small Slam in Diamonds

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 289, 5 January 1945, Page 6

Small Slam in Diamonds

FORTNIGHT’S Mozart festival was unobtrusively opened by 4YA with the Clarinet Concerto on December 7. On the 8th there were two studio recitals -from 3YA a Fantasia and Fugue and from 1YA that hardy perennial, the A Major Piano Concerto; the richer and rarer C Major followed here two days later in a U.S.A. programme and at 2YH the next day (the Schnabel recording). 1ZM gave over its Classical Corner to Don Giovanni, and in listed programmes alone occurred three more concertos, two quartets, a sonata, and the Linz, Paris, Jupiter, and Haffner symphonies. A trio was played from 2ZA’s studio on the 17th, but 1YA capped this with a trio and a sonata from the studio on the 21st. All this may be due to a planned attempt to take our minds off those little trips to Glyndebourne or Salzburg that we had to cancel this year, or to a brief surge of fashion that Mass Observation could explain and Old Moore has long predicted. Many of us are content to sit back and take unquestioningly what comes, remembering in our charity that one man’s fun is the next man’s tedium,

but hoping that no system of rotas and quotas will succeed in removing these eccentricities from the programmes. Each Listener holds still the excitement of a deal of cards, and the weeks when we called "no bid" are easily forgotten when we find two consecutive hands ablaze with a strong suit of diamonds.