CONCERT REPORTING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 372, 9 August 1946, Unnumbered Page

CONCERT REPORTING

Sir.-The report of Lili Kraus’ Recital in your issue of July 5 contains some such curious expressions that I feel I must make some small protest against this type of journalism being used when reporting concerts, as a great deal of it is meaningless and leads us nowhere. Such expressions as: "There isn’t a bar where the music is diverted from its own shape into pienism." | "There are no aimless or perfunctory ebars, and she is never caught resting in that no-man’s land of mezzo-forte, If she is there she is on her way somewhere else, the path clear in her mind." "The seasoned concert-goers of Auckland had been going around saying that they were walking on air, that they had drunk the Milk of Paradise, and so on, and indeed that is what they looked like." ° "They had statted to write to their friends in the South to tell them that they must on no account miss Lili Kraus, and found that in the end they had a page of truly wonderful adjectives in front of them, and a literary effort unfit even for a School Magazine." Again quoting from the report we find: "It is easy enough to say what is wreng with a person’s playing, but

when it ‘is right-in the complete sense that hers is-there are no words. "What Lili Kraus does is simply to deliver such moments, nearly all the time she is playing, far more continuously than any other musician I have ever heard." The final paragraph is perhaps the climax of this meaningless writing. We read: "As she moved up to the Rondo, there was a pause, and then it was like seeing a seaplane taking off from the water, almost out of earshot, watching it and now hearing it, too, coming closer, gathering speed without haste, the sound coming in louder and louder gusts, until with a sudden;roar, it was right overhead. When I came to myself, I marshalled up other performances of the Waldstein. Besides this they were like the noise of a motor-cycle, when a young man?’ starts it up and rides it round and round the block. Wrapping them all up in this simile, I threw them overboard for ever." No School Magazine that I know would welcome this type of reporting, and it is not only the opinion of the writer, but of many others with whom he has discussed the report, that most of it means nothing, and does not add to the prestige of the very good pianist who is in our midst at present.

C. R.

SPACKMAN

(Dunedin).

(We bow to our correspondent’s superior knowledge of school magazines.-Ed.). . ‘