Pickled Piper

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 395, 17 January 1947, Page 8

Pickled Piper

FTER hearing the Marsden School Choir’s singing of The Pied Piper from 2YA last Thursday I felt I had enjoyed half-an-hour of good choral music. The cantata is melodious, almost mellifluous, and falls sweetly upon the eardrums, It was sung melodiously, mellifluously, and at times dramatically, But this charming musical offering could equally well have been the ointment in which was embedded The Highland Reaper, Casabianca or How Horatius Held the Bridge. We might in fact ask, with apologies to Professor Sinclaire, why drag in Browning? These smooth rhythms, this ordered melody, are completely at variance with Browning’s harsh jingles and intentional cacophony. It would be difficult indeed to find a musical equivalent for those rats of Browning’s which squeaked in fifty different sharps and flats, but any composer of the modern school could have told Mr. Rathbone how to do it. But the chief fault of the cantata seemed to me its complete lack of levity, a lack difficult to understand in view of the material on which it was based. How-

ever what might have been a jarring dix parity between words and music was avoided by the fact that the words (as is generally the case in choral singing) were seldom audible, and, Browning being more or less incidental, the net result was a pleasing arrangement of choral and solo numbers.