ONE SMALL WORLD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 484, 1 October 1948, Page 16

ONE SMALL WORLD

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The Listener

September 5 HE new piano concerto by Lennox Berkeley, written for and dedicated to Colin Horsley (as The Listener reported on June 25), was given its first hearing at a Prom on September 1. It is a nervous, excitable kind of music, with orchestral textures and harmonic colourings that kept reminding my ear of the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra by Stravinsky, and at other moments of the Concerto (for two hands) by Ravel. That is to say, there is something in it of the dehydrated-jazz ingredient that found its way into not a few of the austerity recipes of the years-between-the-wars for compositions in this medium, and which so seldom (even at the hands of pupils of the distinguished Nadia Boulanger, Berkeley's teacher of composition) has been made to seem other than a substitute; yet there may well be some inner logic in the Concerto that escapes the ear (especially at a first hearing) of a listener who has heard only one other example of this composer’s music-his startlingly beautiful Stabat Mater. It is written in a _ conversational fashion, not using the 19th Century concerto device of rivalry as between orchestra and soloist, but tending instead to treat the soloist as an extra instrument of the orchestra. There are three movements, each fairly short, and the scoring is for a. fairly small ensemble as these things go (or used to). : The work seems to have been well received. It is now a commonplace, of course, for new compositions, even adventurous ones, to be heard in the first instance at the Proms-so far have the Proms come since -their early Maiden’s Prayer days-and therefore it has enjoyed no more than the usual notices and ignorings of the four-page dailies, which at present are giving most of the space they can spare for music to the Edinburgh Festival. The Times, welcoming a new work from "a mature and profound artist," drew the comparison which the keysignature invites; the concerto is in B Flat and so are (according to The Times) Brahms’s second, Tchaikovski’s first, and that of Arthur Bliss, but this one is "not constructed on the heroic scale." It is ingenioue but "not full blooded," is "lucid ... deft . . . charming" and so on.

It would be difficult to go much further and call it beautiful or important; but it will be an engaging novelty for Colin Horsley to take round during the next two years, when he has the sole performing rights, By * % j : WHILE Mr. ‘Horsley is in my mind, I will allow myself to tell a tale that involves some autobiographical detail. New Zealanders who come to London at the present time must inevitably come with many false notions of what they will find, not the least being notions of hardship and hunger. Of these, no-one like myself can hope to relieve them, 1

. Since they are part of a system’ of misconceptions which the concerted Press. of England and New Zealand believe in; but there is another which I may be able to remove, and that is the notion that London is a vast and lonely place where one will never see a soul one knows, I mentioned in an article a year ago about a day spent in New York, that I had met Colin Horsley in a street somewhere near the New, York Tir offiee-+ by what seemed to ‘me a od to berths queerest sort of chance, ere no "wery good reason for our meeting could be discovered apart from the fact that we had both come off the same ship that day. . London is a good deal bigger than New York, and perhaps New York -is irrelevant anyway, so here now are some simple and true facts about Lo \ set down in the onder of theif rence: ~~ Moris | Piano e 7 ak F Pee a Six months ago I went to live house near Olympia, on the fringes of Kensington and Hammersmith; after some weeks I noticed that a New Zealander whom I half knew was living twa doors away on one side of the house; some more weeks went by, and one summer evening while searching for a jost cat I met a familiar figure at a gate, two doors from home in the opposite direction, This was Colin Horsley, who was far more surprised at finding. me his neighbour than I now was, having had a series of chance meetings in public places with New Zealanders or people I had met first in New Zealand (for instance, Vivienne Dixon, the violinist, in a street in a south-east suburb of London, going to visit her aunt; John Green, the BBC agriculture expert, in Piccadilly; an NZBS radio engineer in the gallery at an Albert Hall concert attended by about 7,000 people; a’ former Wellington journalist in Kensington High Street; a former Wellington photographer in the Strand; and, so on). _, Some more weeks passed and I found that during all this time I had been paying my rent each week to a refugee from Czechoslovakia who was at school with a Czech I had known well in New Zealand. I thus had New Zealanders’ symmetrically placed on either side -of the house, and a link of acquaintance. within its very walls. (I had found it in the first place only by hearing from a daily cleaner in a Paddingtén flat that some friends of people she also worked for in Kensington wére about to let off a floor.) This began to feel rather ‘queer. It would not have surprised me to meet my godmother in Timbukty; actually, I bumped into her in the Strand one day in midsummer. More weeks went by, and I surprised a friend who was with me in a bus queue by nodding to a person (a BBC official) in the crowd in Oxford Street. I offered a wager then’ that in the next three days I would have three encounters with peopie I knew, at least by sight. : On the next day, while cycling through Chelsea I saw the unmistakable figure of Sir Harry Batterbee on the footpath; late. at night on the second day, having supper after a theatre in a Lyons Corner House (a vast place in itself) I found

that the man at the next table was a New Zealander who had come to England on the same boat as myself; on the third day (the fourth of the full series) I almost ran down the great bulk of Robert Gibbings in Kensington High Street, where he was ignoring cyclists in his anxiety to catch a taxi. He gave me his address-in the next street to mine. * * . T is said that there are 12,000,000 people in London and 43,000,000 in England. Perhaps chance meetings in London can be accounted for by some law of convergences, and certainly in my three days’ straight run I had kept my eyes about me more than anyone normally would. But what. law accounts for this? Some months ago, looking for cheap accommodation outside London, I answered an advertisement in the New Statesman and Nation. Af er some correspondence I visited the place to see if it would answer my purpose. It was then occupied by a young anthropolocist. who said he had been born in

Christchurch, New Zealand, but had left it as a child. He had mentioned my name to his mother, and her reply had been "Oh, I know who that is; I danced with his father once." The anthropologist, heaven be praised, is now in Borneo, and perhaps the spell is ended. After all this, perhaps it is scarcely worth mentioning what started my writing of it-namely that I met Mr. Horsley on the street twice on the day of his Concerto performance-on his way to the final rehearsal, and on his way back. That, after all, was'a simple case of propinquity; but I have made it my excuse for putting these facts down in a manner which I hope might impress young New Zealanders who may be thinking of coming to London to get away from familiar faces. * * * UMMER is beginning to leave us now, and I have left it until this late date to say something of the Battersea

tion, which many Londoners will remember as the best thing about the summer of 1948. By the time this is printed in New Zealand the exhibition will have closed but the idea will surely be heard of again, because the public response to it has been so great that it was even described to me by a Press officer of the London County Council (which arranged the exhibition) as "embarrassing." There were 43. sculptures in the collection, including two Rodins, three Maillols, two Epsteins, two Henry Moores, and some Frank Dobsons. Others by less widely known artists included some very risible rubbish and a few pieces of sweetly-pretty nonsense, together with some things of great Park Sculpture Exhibi-

beauty in a modest way-three pieces by women come to mind as I say it. They were placed with much cunning | in a leafy, hillocky dell beside a lake | in the park.’ You paid a shilling to go in, and inside the enclosure was a mobile canteen serving tea and sandwiches, and a marquee where some young sculpture students worked a little self-consciously on clay or stone. You could go there for a day and lie about under the trees, shifting from time to time so that a new sculpture or a new aspect of your favourite one would take you by surprise when you looked up from your book. This, I found, was the secret of it-to catch an unintended glimpse of, for instance, Henry Moore’s Three Standing Figures, and to be caught off guard by some fresh impression of it. People who have now enjoyed the feeling of discovery that this exhibition gave them will never feel the same again (continued on next page)

LONDON LETTER

(continued from previous page) about seeing sculpture the other waythe premeditated approach, catalogue in hand, the pause to examine deliberately, the flat feeling when there is no response, possibly because the gallery lighting is so even or so dim that there is no strength of shadow. At Battersea Park we saw Eric Gill’s marvellous torso "Mankind" go through remarkable changes from morning light to mid-day sun and pass the late afternoon with sunlight flickering down to her through the leaves of tall trees. The warm honey-coloured stone of Moore’s Three Standing Figures seemed immutable in almost any light. And one strange, amusing, but not absurd piece by McWilliam (a Kneeling Figure, having legs and arms and head but no trunk, the upper limbs being supported by an elbow on a knee) would sometimes serve as a kind of spy-glass for watching the swans on the lake, or boys fooling round in a hired dinghy. How the sculptures needed the sunlight, everyone was saying, and wondering why it had not been obvious before.

And, one could add, ‘how the trees and the lake needed the sculptures! * * * HE park is on the south side of the Thames, near a huge gasometer and the famous Battersea Power Station, and is also adjacent to one of London’s concentrations of poorly-housed, beautystarved working people. Thus it was possible for Mollie Panter-Downes, the New Yorker’s English correspondent, to write that Londoners were "pouring across Battersea Bridge" to see the exhibition; but nothing could have been more wrong than her implication that it was attracting no interest from its own immediate neighbours. True, crowds of people from north of the Thames did cross the river where they seldom go otherwise, but they must have been far outnumbered by the homely slummocky women with baskets and sometimes with children over 12 (a shilling each), and the family parties and couples on Sundays, who came inside the enclosure to look about with very obvious pleasure at what was for them a new kind of beauty. The gate figures were about 150,000 for four months. On sunny days attend-

ances reached 3,000, and on cold days dropped to 500 or so.» Some Thames launch proprie‘ors arranged ‘a special service from Westminster pier to take people there. Like the Edinburgh Festival, the idea has sprung fully grown from birth with such virility that no one can imagine that it could lapse now, and it would be astonishing if it did not become an annual summer pleasure for London. Meanwhile, one permanent benefit is tangible-the Three Standing Figures of Henry Moore. A representative of the Contemporary Arts Society, speaking at the opening ceremony, sprang a surprise by making public an offer to present the figures to the L.C.C. There were protests at once from persons who abhorred the sculpture, who said (and possibly with some truth at that stage) that the L.C.C. must be embarrassed by the offer. But the figures have been accepted, and there must be a possibility that they will stand where they are now-on a slope beneath two giant silver poplars, their backs to the lake, and their strange small eyes peering up to the sky, seeming to say, "Is it one of ours?"

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