ORCHESTRAL CONCERT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 10

ORCHESTRAL CONCERT

Rimsky-Korsakov’s "Prelude and Cortége" (Le Coq D'or), Haydn’s London Symphony moves quietly, laying tone by tone with a careful observation of their effeet and with the instruments moving in more obvious unison. Glazounov’s tone poem Stenka Razin, performed for the first time in New Zealand by the National Orchestra and relayed by 3YC, leaned too heavily upon the "Volga Boatmen" for me to extract much else from it. As a layman, though, I am very much interested in the way a composer’s imagination works when setting pure music to a tale such as this. How literally do passages of music follow the emotional outline of the story? If one dared to break the silence of the trained listener, would he say, "Ah, now; precisely with that movement, he has sacrificed the princess to the river"? Night had made an effort to claim me by the time we reached Sibelius, whose sombre flowing moods liberate the shadowy myths from the lakes as they move by with depth of feeling I cannot often find in music. A further hindrance was an accompanying rattle of static with each increase of the orchestra’s pitch and volume, that denotes either an ill-ad- justed microphone or a sudden fault in my radio. r ee the purling waters of