Rekindled Enthusiasm

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 546, 9 December 1949, Page 10

Rekindled Enthusiasm

VY often have we heard Manuel de Falla’s "Ritual Fire Dance’ from visiting pianists desiring to end their Programmes with a flourish, so often have Hollywood virtuosi slammed it out on anything up to twenty: pianos, so often has it throbbed from the radio on orchestra, xylophone and’ harmonica, that it is in somo slight danger of losing. its freshness. The only way, I believe, to give new life to a piece like this is to play it in its context as was done in a recent Ring up the Curtain programme. Here the BBC Theatre Orchestra presented a potted version of the great Spanish composer’s Love the Magician, as well as his more familiar Three-Cornered Hat music. The commentary was brief, but illuminating. I had vaguely associated the "Ritual Fire Dance" with some solemn pagan placation, but to learn its place in Falla’s ballet as Candelas’s attempt to drive away the jealous ghost of her dead lover was to appreciate fully for the first time its fantastic and barbaric qualities, and its dramatic significance. The semioriental Andalusian melodies which make up Love the Magician are so haunting that I regretted still more that the too frequent performance of oné section alone seems to prevent our hearing the others save on rare occasions like this.