A NEW ORATORIO
Sir,-Your guest critic, Arthur Jacobs, hopes he may quash Eric Curtis’s oratorio, The Christ, before the public hears it. I hope, no music critic anywhere has power to do such a thing. He should be struck off the rolls for trying to. Has our profession an_ infallible record for picking winners? So far, The Christ has been heard only in Auckland, where the Ardmore Teachers’ Training College gave its
premiere in 1951. It has a chance now of being performed in the south, by a fully experienced choir, and of being broadcast. Surely any competently written music is entitled to this much airing, whatever its idiom. Mr. Jacobs points out that the Christchurch Harmonic Society was last engaged in the Mass in B Minor. The Mass is always great guns in any argument against another composer. The Mass has been sanctified by nearly a century of choirs and music critics. who woke up to it about a century after its composer died. The Harmonic Society proposes now to risk an almost untried oratorio, in the composer’s hearing. In doing so. they may be closer than Mr, Jacobs is to the spirit of that generous, old-fashioned provincial-J. S. Bach.
D.F.
T.
(Auckland )
(More letters on this subject have been held over until next week.-Ed.)
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 5
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216A NEW ORATORIO New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 5
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