Mouth-Organ Concerto
MUST start dining out again gn the story of the assistant in the New Plymouth book-and-floral-calendar-and-china-rabbit-shop who asked: "What’s an etching?" Till the other night I had forgotten her air of condescension when I explained and she realised that, as it could not be kicked or milked, it was not worth another thought in Taranaki. "What’s a harmonica?" I almost asked as I read a poster outside the Albert Hall. As I realised that it was the same sort of mouth-organ from which my boyish. exuberance had once produced the most unharmonic sounds, I began to. enjoy a similar feeling of condescension, the superior pity that an admirer of Bach feels for anyone uninhibited enough to confess to a liking for cinema organs. Then I saw the name Larry Adler. That made all the difference, and so 5000 people thought at a Saturday night Prom concert when they cheered his playing of an Arthur Benjamin concerto written spectally for the mouth-organ-sorry, harmonica. As he has demonstrated so frequently, Larry Adler has a way of his own with music-the virtuoso’s way-and he also has a way with musicians, bending them to his purpose with the same skill as he displays on his own chosen instrument. With the London Symphony Orchestra, he made a Romance out of Vaughan Williams as well as the full-dress concerto by another contemporary British composer.
The concerto has no unforgettable, unforgotten enchantment, but it has a combination of qualities-once expected, but now rare-of ambition and charm. Its three movements are ‘not. only technically satisfying, but they are also -with brass as well as strings, celesta and xylophone-exotically ravishing. Indeed, Benjamin has carried off some bold combinations such as a cantilena for the soloist against a chattering by the wind, and a blend of mouth-organ and low-lying flutes in the same movement. Perhaps the greatest aghievement of composer and soloist was to make real music suitable for Saturday night which, according to a self-sorry songster, is the loneliest night of the week. Which "of them was considered to have earned the applause is a point of no magnitude; the. only certainty is that it was
deafening.
J. W.
Goodwin
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 18
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363Mouth-Organ Concerto New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 18
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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