Recorded Prom

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 454, 5 March 1948, Page 12

Recorded Prom

HE broadcast from 4YA of a recording of one of the famous Promenade Concerts was a thrilling occasion-in-deed, the nearest thing to being one of the vast audience. One fact a listener so many thousands of miles away might be thankful for-one didn’t have to stand throughout the performance as did so many of the packed enthusiasts in the hall. This was a memorable concert, including as it did the first London performance of the 9th Symphony of Shostakovich. A solitary radio listener, hearing for the first time a record of a new work, forms a strictly private judgment, which certainly makes for an unbiassed opinion; but in a record of an actual concert performance, as at the performance itself, the same listener’s reaction cannot help but be influenced by the behaviour of the audience. I should probably have come to the same conclusion in either case-namely, that this symphony, full of gaiety and effervescent high spirits, will probably find a firm place in the hearts of most concert audiences; but the excited buzzing of the audience after each movement, and the storm of applause after the finale, made me realise that hundreds of other people had also shared my .opinion-always a pleasing thought. The applause for Shostakovich, however, was as nothing compared with the wild outburst of enthusiasm when the symphony had been followed by a barbaric and brilliant performance of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor. This was a spontaneous tribute to a splendid rendering of music which is as vital and arresting now as the day it was written.