HOW GOOD ARE AUSTRALIAN MUSICIANS?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 292, 26 January 1945, Page 13

HOW GOOD ARE AUSTRALIAN MUSICIANS?

Provocative Report by Neville Cardus:

""T'EMPO," the Boosey and Hawkes quarterly, prints a report on Australian music by Neville Cardus that is likely to arouse a storm in Sydney and Melbourne. Here are some extracts: ONCERTS in Australia nowadays are increasing in number and filling halls as never before, if a symphony is in the programme. A small hall will be packed even for a chamberconcert if it is given by Thomas Matthews and Eileen Ralph. . . . But, as might. be expected anywhere, it is the orchestral programme that draws the crowd. They swarm the town halls of Sydney and Melbourne as of old they swarmed the turnstiles at Test matches. Whether after the war, with all the old pastimes back again-flood-lit tennis and surfing and what-not-these crowds will maintain interest in music, is a matter for conjecture... . Given proper encouragement — and given also the inborn devotion of people from overseas,, many of whom have sought refuge here — it should not be impossible for Australia to achieve a corporate, instead of a scattered musical life. But a more imaginative aesthetic approach needs to be taught in the conservatoriums and schools; the musicteaching and, indeed, teaching every- where (even in the universities), is too practical; wanting the atmosphere of the humanities. j x * * EUGENE ORMANDY, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, has just arrived. After a half-dozen or so

rehearsals, he has created the illusion that Australia possesses almost a virtuoso orchestra, He has been allowed to call together the best players of the Commonwealth; the native conductors have, as a rule, to put up with local talent. But Ormandy’s, transforming act is not to be accounted for merely by the fact that here and there an instrumental tone is truer and more expert than usual; he has bound nearly every orchestral strand into a solid, vibrant, and homogeneous texture, based on a rich fundamental tone. And he has given to the players (many of them young girls scarcely of the professional levels of skill and experience) the glittering efficiency of the orchestras of America! Musicians in Sydney and Melbourne are hot with praise of Ormandy’s powers; and the general public is wildly enthusiastic. As an interpreter, Ormandy has large and comprehensive ideas; he makes a symphony sound entirely symphonic. His handling of the second symphony of Brahms was noble, yet romantic, lacking only the Brahmsian ease and amplitude of gait. Ormandy tends to keep a rhythm on the intense side; and his love for an overwhelming crescendo is apparently irresistible. He is still a young man as conductors goin the mid-forties-and if he can come to relaxation and reflection and the note of philosophy, he will soon take his piace in the very front rank of interpreters of orchestral music anywhere. He has, according to press reports, said flattering things in public about the Melbourne orchestra, even suggesting (if he has not been mis-reported)

that it is "equal to the best in the world with the exception of the orchestras of New York, Boston and Philadelphia." As a true son of Manchester, let me hasten to state that there are scarcely half-a-dozen players in the Melbourne (or the Sydney) orchestras who would obtain a position in the Halle Orchestra. And nobody in Manchester who knows the first thing about orchestras would claim that the Halle is in the "streamlined" American class. But if the Melbourne orchestra is only a third part as good as Ormandy seemingly thinks it is, it could not have attained these levels of excellence without good training in the past, especially during those hard-pressed war years.