First Test

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 403, 14 March 1947, Page 5

First Test

that everybody was satisfied with the symphony orchestra’s first concert. If that had happened it would have been as bad for the orchestra itself as for those who listened to it. It would have meant that we really are as complacent in New Zealand as it has become the fashion to say that we are. But in music at any rate we are not complacent. We are often unreasonably critical. The perfectionists made it very difficult for the orchestra to get established, and the soured and superior ones have not made it easy for the players to test public opinion. It has no doubt been good for the orchestra all in all that it has had to do its first months of training to the accompaniment of a good deal of whispering and head-shaking, but there is a point beyond which that should not go. That point was reached at the first concert, which certainly proved that while there is still a long and difficult road ahead of the orchestra, it is equipped for the journey. It is still permissible, and still necessary, to criticise, but it is not permissible any longer to be negatively critical and coldly resistant. The new page has been turned and the new. chapter started, and that is as much as anyone should ask for a year or two. An orchestra is not a machine. It is a living organism and must be given time to grow. But opinion must be given time to grow too. Perfection in performance will come long before we can expect T would be foolish to pretend judgment and good taste in listen-. ing. It has after all taken us a century to establish this orches-tra-not a bad performance in the circumstances, but a _ warning against impatience, It will probably be thought in another hundred years that it was a very bold step to start anything so ambitious in 1946; as we now wonder at the boldness of the pioneers in the field of public works.