ACCOMPANIST WORKS HARD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 383, 25 October 1946, Page 7

ACCOMPANIST WORKS HARD

Raymond Lambert Likes French Composers

AYMOND LAMBERT (above) arrived in New Zealand last week for his broadcast tour as accompanist and solo pianist with the dramatic soprano Joan Hammond. He arrived in Auckland on Monday afternoon and left for Wellington by the main trunk express on Tuesday afternoon; in the meantime he put in two hours on Tuesday morning working in the 1YA studio on the solo pieces he was to play in the first concert in Wellington (October 19) notably the Bach -chaconne arranged for piano by Busoni. I asked him why it was we heard Bach neat so seldom, why so often we heard instead the arrangements for piano. "Tt is very simple because Bach .wrote his music for the clavichord and harpsichord and not for the piano," he said, "and it| sounds too thin, too meagre very often when it is played on the piano. And of course this chaconne is violin music and so has to be arranged for piano-and Busoni has done it very well, he was surely the king of arrangers. He understood Bach very well and was also a supreme master of the piano."

"It is a very difficult thing to play Bach well," he said. "It needs years and years of study; -it is necessary to understand the musical language of Bach and most important of all, to understand the period in which he lived. But then this is necessary for any piano playing; no One can expect to become a good pianist without a thorough study of the classical writers and the _ classical periods." In Melbourne on the Friday evening before he left Mr. Lambert gave a concert of solo piano works in the Town Hall. This was his first big solo recital for several years. During the war he has been travelling with singers as accompanist and has appeared very often at concerts for the troops and concerts to raise funds for patriotic purpeses. His concert tours covered Australia from Adelaide to Darwin. I asked him if he had found, as Solomon and others found during the war, that audiences of servicemen demanded serious music rather than light music. "Oh, yes, they did ask for plenty of serious music; but I can’t say that such requests were the most numerous." I asked Mr. Lambert if he ever felt he was taking a too modest place, being accompanist for so many singers. "Not at all," he said. "Every serious artist will tell you that a sympathetic accompanist is of very great importance. And, of course, in these tours in which I work partly as accompanist and partly as a solo pianist there is an enormous amount of work to be done. There is rehearsing with the soloist and then separate study of the pieces to be played. And then in such a case the accompanist is actually on the stage for the whole evening; moreover, he has to change |

completely from one type of playing to another and back again. I can assure you it is really hard work." He Likes Debussy Mr. Lambert, who has been in Australia off and on for twenty years-he was two years in Europe and England studying from 1934 to 1936 and he toured New Zealand with John Brownlee after that-still has a distinct accent. He is Belgian by birth and began his study at the Brussels Conservatoire. For this reason, he thinks, he is particularly sympathetic to the work of Debussy and others of the French school. But he says he much enjoys playing the work. of -Prokofieff and Shostakovich and other moderns as well. Mr. Lambert is an examiner for the Australian Examiners’ Board and teaches Piano music at the University of Mel-« bourne Conservatorium of Music. In a picture shop in Shortland Street some reproductions, in most delicate colour, of Twelfth Century Chinese colour prints were displayed and Mr. Lambert and I stood gazing in admiration and delight. Beside us stood two elderly men, They turned and went on up the street and one said gruffly to the other: "Huh! This modern futurist stuff doesn’t appeal to me." "Dear me," said Mr. Lambert, "perhaps I should cut those Shostakovich preludes out of my programmes."

J.