Food and Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 320, 10 August 1945, Page 8

Food and Music

HOULD I be considered a no-brow if I suggested that we in New Zealand are a little too devout in our attitude to great music? When I went to the lunchhour recital by Olive Campbell, Mary Martin, and Wilfred Simenauer, I was in an informal mood. I thought that, instead of sitting passively by my radio (this piano and ‘cello recital was the second of the concerts to be broadcast). I would go along and listen direct to what turned out to be a cheer-worthy programme. Alas! the rest of the audience was only in a clapping mood, and my "bravo" was choked to death before it was born. Only once in a long history of concert-going have I heard’ a Dunedin audiente cheering. When these concerts were originated in the National Gallery, London, the main thing about them was the informality of the affairthe squeezing of the audience into-every corner of the place, the unbounded enthusiasm, the necessity for using the intervals between items for the nibbling of necessary lunches. If the concerts are not for people who have only a limited lunch-hour and no place to partake thereof, for what reason are they given at so awkward an hour? Of musi-. cians I saw a plethora in the audience; of genuine musically- minded quickdiners, not a trace-not a solitary lunch box, nor the corner of even one sandwich. The musically-devout Bachworshipper evidently deems it a profanation to take food to a concert. A little less of the religious atmosphere at our concerts, and a loosening of the emotional inhibitions in the matter of applause, would do a lot towards bringing audience and performers closer together, }