Something New! Something New!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 534, 16 September 1949, Page 10

Something New! Something New!

EEMS TAYLOR tells the story of a horn player who was once vigorously criticised for his playing of a solo in a Tchaikovski symphony. By years of study and practice he played it one night as it had never been played before. Next’ morning he opened his paper with anticipation to read the praise he knew would be his; he read "last night in the horn solo, Mr. A. was in magnificent form." Mr, A, was the conductor. I think programme organisers are like the horn player. When they do good work in getting together groups of items the praise for the selection naturally goes to the performer. When the works are poorly grouped and the organisation creaks we are inclined to say, "Why on earth did the programme organiser let stuff like this through?" I have been looking over my notes on 30 groups of songs I have heard broadcast by local singers in the past three months. I placed 19 of these groups as being really’ good examples of programme organisation, the songs of excellent standard placed in reasonable association. The other 11 groups I have thought had some very decided weakness in the selection of the songs or in their juxtaposition, matters which were within the control of the programme organiser. I don’t know whether any criticism I may make of these groupings may be helpful to the harassed programme organiser, with whose troubled life I have the greatest sympathy, but here it is. _ First, I think that there is not so much as there used to be of the sin of grouping together the songs of four or five divergent schools. This was the principle of trying to please everybody at once and pleasing nobody. It is not dead, however, as a Rotorua programme showed with Beethoven’s "In Questa Tomba," an English traditional song, a Negro Spiritual, and RimskyKorsakov’s "Hindu Song"-the whole being the musical equivalent of sardines on chocolate biscuits. | WONDER whether Plunkett Greene’s famous hook Interpretation in Song, with its warning against such groupings, is much read by singers to-day. It would be a salutary lesson to some of them. I suppose it is quite useless to complain of women singing songs the words of which are so obviously meant to be sung by men, The young woman who this week sgng Vaughan Williams’s "Silent Noon"’-did she, as I suspect, not bother to think at all, but just make as pleasant a sound as she could? A far more serious weakness which programme organisers are allowing to flourish is the singing by local performers of groups which contain four or five examples of the greatest songs ever written-songs recorded (and broadcast) over and over again by great artists. Singers who do this are asking to be compared by the regular listener with the recordings he knows; it is impossible to do otherwise. How much more

enterprising are those performers who explore the less well-known paths of song or, if they feel they must sing a famous masterpiece to show how much better they are than Marian Anderson, who surround it with two or three less familiar works. Singers are the most

unenter prising of people, and it isthe duty of the -programme _ organiser to jolt the lazy ones out of the rut. How many songs did Brahms write? Enough to prevent "The Vain Suit" from being broadcast four times in a

fortnight, as it was recently. And the baritones who will sing ""The Wanderer" over and over again-how many of them explore the fascinating and dramatic songs of Loewe in the same vein? When did we last hear a group of the ‘delightful songs of Franz, so ideally suitable in their intimate way for broadcasting? Where are the minor Russian masters, to say nothing of the major works of Moussorgsky? — I’m tired of "The Dreary Steppe.’ As Leslie Henson says, "Something new! something new!"

D.

M.