MUSIC IN NEW ZEALAND –1947

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 444, 26 December 1947, Page 6

MUSIC IN NEW ZEALAND –1947

Random Recollections of an Exciting Year

--- | Written for "The Listener" |

by

DOROTHEA

TURNER

HERE were wild times in the past. One year Kreisler gave ‘concerts one week and GalliCurci the. next. Later, in the depression, Szigeti coincided with a season of Italian opera. Those who had. jobs rushed from the lovely tunes of Verdi to the austerity of unaccompanied. Bach, and back again to the lovely tunes of Puccini. Such little skirmishes were poor training for the season of 1947, as we now know. Radio had mot come to widen our experience or complicate our choice. We went to concerts or we missed them. When Kreisler moved to another centre he was gone. Next week’s decision was simple and local: "Shall we now hear Galli-Curci?" After the Centennial music there were five years when few came from overseas. Local professionals and amateurs worked hard. Some fine chamber music was played by the NZBS String Quartet and by other groups. Music seemed very much needed, but as things were it flourished best among small numbers. Many turned to recorded music and worked hard there in their quiet way. Broadcast programmes improved, and ‘when overseas artists began to come again they didn’t all understand how audiences had changed. In 1945 we began to have new pianists from abroad and we enjoyed these concerts wholeheartedly. The Town Halls were full again to the rafters and the piano was well under control. We were~in no mood to be critical of the first few. The NZBS seemed to think we should be taken a stage further. In 1946 it became a major entrepreneur, and arranged that two pianists well known through their recordings should visit New Zealand within a few weeks of each other-Lili Kraus and Solomon. Here we had two artists of comparable age and status, playing some of the same major works, using the same _ instruments, and showing an unusual regard for the written intentions of the composers. In spite of this they didn’t sound a bit alike. The discussions that followed had to leave the ground and concern themselves in the stratosphere with a search for the composers’ unwritten in--tentions. The heat and vigour of this search amazed those who were still only . too thankful to sit back and hear the ‘right notes delivered in pleasing fashion; for the more adventurous it was a fine affair. People did not always think very

clearly before they spoke, and often less clearly while they were speaking, but some of them found in the end that they knew what they thought when they heard what they said. As an exercise in criticism it was good preparation for 1947. And the concerts themselves were excellent, of course, though some of the pianos were not. In March, 1947, the National Orchestra of the NZBS gave its first concerts in Wellington and then went on tour. Crowds were great and so was the excitement. Comment poured in from all quarters, and from all points of view. Critics have had to find their feet too, not knowing what is a fair standard to expect of our new orchestra. In the long run it must be nothing short of the best, and as long as it travels steadily in that direction all is well. I think it is more complimentary to such a good team not to make too many allowances. Once you begin making allowances in music you may end up in the admirably humane position of Lady Catharine de Bourgh, who was convinced that her daughter "would have been a delightful performer had her health allowed her to learn." Pressure Dangers As the national possession of a small country the orchestra may be exposed to many kinds of pressure. New Zealand has never been very good at choosing experts and leaving them to go about things in their own way. This may be a healthy democratic sign, but I doubt whether music responds to such treatment. I was disturbed when so many people openly suggested that a national orchestra should play the kind of music that everybody understood. Argued from expediency alone the matter surely stands the other way-there will be a national orchestra only as long as enough people try to understand the kind of music it enjoys playing. We allow soloists to play what they like because we know they are not worth listening to otherwise, and the same holds for an orchestra, though it’s a more complicated affair. An amateur violinist once told me that he always judged the composers by the amount of fun they gave the second fiddles, and by this rule of thumb he had them in the same. order of merit as the most learned critic. If the truth is not so simple, it lies somewhere in that direction. People who work at music all the time are kept alive by what is difficult and adventurous. If our best players cannot find it here they will look

for it elsewhere. The orchestra must be protected from boredom and from the staleness of too much routine playing, because if it begins to lose interest in itself nobody will find it worth listening to. But of 1947-so far so good. About the time the orchestral tour was beginning, Robert Pikler, the Hungarian violinist, arrived to give broadcasts with Lili Kraus. This was chamber music in the true spirit; and if violinists who had become openly restive during the piano solc talk .that had held the floor tor the past 18 months, now found that there was more in the piano parts of the Mozart and Beethoven "violin" sonatas than any of their own "accompanists" had brought to their notice, they bore it pretty well. Later Robert Pikler gave a fine performance of the Mendelssohn Concerto in Christchurch with the National Symphony Orchestra, and was the first solo violinist to play with them. Christchurch Crisis About the middle of June I quite lost any grip I might have had on the general trends of music in New Zealand. I imagine that each of the centres had a period similar to the one Auckland had then. Christchurch seems to have had a crisis in July when its own weeklong festival fell in a month of concerts by visitors. In the third week of June the National Symphony Orchestra opened its Auckland season, the KrausPikler duo began the Beethoven cycle, and the Polish pianist Mierowski played in the Town Hall. The next week Colin Horsley played with the orchestra, Ninon Vallin sang in the Town Hall, and Eugene Goossens arrived at short notice to conduct the orchestra. He conducted again the next week, by which time the Boyd Neel Orchestra had arrived and attended this concert in a body. They gave their own opentpg concert the next night, and whether or not it was the healthy competition I don’t know, but this first concert was the best of the six they gave in Auckland. Warwick Braithwaite had come in the meantime and was listening to the National Symphony Orchestra while he waited to take over the baton for their final concert. Four conductors were present at one rehearsal that week: Andersen Tyrer, Eugene Goossens, Warwick Braithwaite and Boyd Neel. And a member of the Boyd Neel Orchestra was noticed wringing her hands and moaning as she watched the big four in conference. She

had left her camera at the hotel and missed a photo she might have sold for £50 in London, ‘The hall was not so full for the first Boyd Neel concert as for later ones. The orchestra captured the town by its playing rather than by its reputation. And it was a very diverse audience that capitulatéd. At the first concert I heard one of our best woodwind players announce that he was taking ap the ’cello to-morrow, and various competent pianists stated that they had Wasted their Lives. A number of people who said they didn’t "know anything about music" went several times. And many gramophiles became finally established as concertgoers. They had begun to creep out warily when Lili Kraus and Solomon came, and again for the National Symphony Orchestra. One saw them bewildered and irritated by the crowds around them, adjusting themselves to the acoustical differences of live performance, ‘and training eye to work with ear. It needed such concerts as we have’ had in the past 12 months to bring them back to the halls. I hope they will stay there-without ,throwing any records in the fire-because the double life can be richer than either of the single ones, and because every concert audience needs more of these knowledgeable enthusiasts. Centrifugal Forces This is one of many good things that have happened for the first time in 1947. Some powerful force seems to have been working to break down the watertight compartments of musical life. Children who have worked with their teachers to form school orchestras have been shown what a symphony orchestra is like, and know that the day they leave school is not necessarily the end of it all. Groups have hived off at times from the National Symphony Orchestra, as they did from the Boyd Neel, to play chamber music in which unusual combinations of instruments are needed. The loss to the chamber music world from the concentration of players in our orchestra may not be so grave as we feared, and the players themselves say that it does them good to work in these smaller groups sometimes where they can hear all that is going on. Musicians who have been brought on contract to New Zealand have been able to stay longer to teach, talk or play with local musicians, And apart from the lively way the NZBS has made use of new opportunities, even when they came at short notice, music has suddenly become more accessible in other ways to country districts. The Boyd Neel Orchestra went off the beaten track, as did Clement Q. Williams and others concerned with serious music. Warwick Braithwaite conducted the Hamilton Civic Orchestra, And in a village hall you might or might not notice halfway on the journey between Hamilton and Rotorua, the Kraus-Pikler duo played the 10 sonatas of Beethoven to packed houses on three consecutive nights under very much better acoustical conditions than Auckland could provide (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) for the same cycle. Various musical organisations exchanged news and artists with unprecedented energy. Travel was possible again, which ~is not to say it was any fun for those who arranged or underwent it. One notable mass migration was the week-end visit of the Schola Cantorum at the invitation of the Auckland Chamber Music Society. They spent Friday and Sunday ‘nights on the Main Trunk and gave two concerts in between, both of which . were broadcast. Nearly .2,000 people sat silently listening to a programme of Bach’s non-secular music in the Town Hall on a Sunday afternoon, and went quietly away wondering why this. kind of music was not there more often. Everybody Was Pleased In the spring Isaac Stern made a swift tour for the NZBS and seems to have pleased everyone. We now have such people during their best working years. It used not to be so. Simon Barere came and played the piano in that grand mannet I thought I had been born too late to hear. He found the bust of Liszt lying in long grass, wiped the moss from its brow and put it back on the pedestal. . Even with the visiting musicians removed, the broadcast programmes of 1947 look better than before. Series have been arranged which are satisfying to the steady listener, though exacting to performers. Dorothy Davies played many of the Haydn sonatas, and Haagen Holenbergh a series of Beethoyen. George Hopkins and Owen Jensen covered a wide range of music ‘for clarinet and piano; and lately 2YA has had a series of choral music by the Studio Singers, and of early English music by various performers. Although 1947 has found people pretty tired about other things in life, there has been energy in every cornet of music. Hallkeepers combed odd rooms in municipal buildings and brought out

everything but the mayor’s throne to seat the crowds that came to hear John Charles Thomas. Douglas Lilburn wrote .a major work, Song of the Antipodes, which had its first performance in Well-| ington, played by the National Symphony, Orchestra under Warwick Braithwaite. A man who opened a _ bookingoffice queue with bed and blankets at 1.30 a.m. found it difficult to convince two policemen that he was only waiting for the Messiah. The Philip Neill Memorial Prize for composers was won for the first time by a womean-by two women, in fact. And this month the numbers of skilled arid devoted musicians needed for Bach’s Mass in B Minor have been assembled at last and 2YA has broadcast what is probably the first performance of the Mass in New Zealand. This survey is parochial and limited, because in 1947 there has been more and enough music close at hand. When we hanker for foreign capitals we imagine we are longing only for their standards and forget that we are starved also of choice. This year we have had both. I left Auckland only three times during the year for music. Most of the time there was more here than I could digest. I missed Dorothy Helmrich because I was at a music school where about 50 people sang around me day and night. None of them sang as well as she does, but most of them tried as hard and there’s something in that. Later, when I saw how things were going, I decided to concentrate on orchestras, chamber music and pianists-if that can be called concentration-and I missed an outstanding year of vocal music. Next year I hope to,.concentrate on singers. If a fair and impartial survey is to be made, it must be done by someone who has sat detached, like the man in the creepy play The Wrecker. He had a coloured electric chart on his wall which showed him where each train was at any given moment, but he travelled in none of them.