Celeste Grows Up

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 663, 21 March 1952, Page 10

Celeste Grows Up

ISRESPECIFUL descriptions orchestral instruments are common enough; an oboe, to the irreverent, is

an ill wind that no one blows good, a contra-bassoon is a back-firing bed-post, and so on. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of the celeste as a piano whose voice hasn’t broken? We. so rarely hear this instrument that most people must believe that Tchaikovski’s CasseNoisette Suite is the only work which employs it. Like everyone else, then, I associated the celeste with the pretty cavortings of the Sugar-Plum Fairy alone, until 1YC recently played Bela Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste. The gulf between Tchai-kovski-and Bartok as composers was indicated by thé differences in their use of the instrument-in the one case light, graceful, delicate, in the other, dark, tart, often harsh. Bartok’s unexpected dignifying of the tinkling toy, and his exploitation of the colour-changes in the "mellow lower octave made this piece a high point of my week’s listening. One qualification, however-the superior 1LYC listener, obviously better informed than the VOA or BBC Concert Hall audience, was assumed to know all that needed to be known about this unusual work and hence to require no introdug tory explanation.