Concerto Season at 1YA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 309, 25 May 1945, Page 9

Concerto Season at 1YA

MUSICAL highlight of the week from 1YA was the "Grieg Concerto" played by Andersen Tyrer and the Studio Orchestra. Concertos have an inevitable fascination for the soloist, orchestra, and audience. Basically this attraction arises from the universally felt thrill of the antithesis of the individual and the crowd; in short, it is the thrill of the contest. The battle may have all the intensity of a high-powered blitz, as in the Tchaikovski piano concerto; and when two such aggressive strategists as Horowitz and Toscanini are joined in this work, the result, musically speaking, is likely to be devastating. Then there is the dour grappling of the Brahms D Minor, when piano and orchestra, like a pair of classical wrestlers, seem inextricably locked together. The Grieg piano concerto — incidentally the composer’s only excursion into this form-

is a frolic on the village green, a contest for fun. There is a good deal of rustic poetry in it too, and it. depends on the pianist, his mood and his temperament, whether he indulges himself in a little pastoral romanticism or gives his head and heart into his hand’s keeping and plunges into a peasant dance. Andersen Tyrer admitted all the poetry of the slow movement-a beautiful piece of tone spinning with an especial thrill at the breathless moment when the piano enters after those two figures on the horns. The last movement was a bit too bacchanalian for me, and when the pianist reached the coda the new rhythm wavered a little. * *

NDERSEN TYRER was accompanied in the Grieg by the 1YA Studio Orchestra considerably augmented. In fact, one hears that, in the string section at least, practically every available string player had been coopted, and evidence of the march of time, even a considerable part of the 1ZB Orchestra. » The microphone can flatter the voice and make a piping drawing-room singer sound, in volume at least, equal to Caruso; but the only thing that sounds like a large body of strings is a large body of strings. Here in the Grieg was the authentic quality. It was pleasant also to hear the inside parts of the brass section, although studio control did not always bring out the different ensembles: to the best advantage. Still, it was the makings of a symphony orchestra and this augmentation invites a question as to the relative importance of interpreter and composer. Lesser pianists, who in all truth may have studied the works they play as conscientiously as Mr. Tyrer, have to make shift with inadequate orchestral support which sometimes sounds only remotely like the music the composer wrote. Surely the first courtesy is to the composer, and what major works cannot have the orchestration asked might be laid aside for more propitious times while the studio orchestras devoted’ their time to works within the scope of their numbers. There is still a large field little explored in the Mozart-Haydn period, and a good deal of Beethoven too.