The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 782, 16 July 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

. £. | WE can’t have our cake and eat it, I suppose, Listening to Vivien Dixon in the final broadcast of a series of Mozart violin sonatas (2YC) was a reminder of how much music is locked up in the National Orchestra. Miss Dixon’s playing is usually lost in the thicket of first violins. It emerged on this occasion to present Mozart of some considerable elegance, set off, too, by Frederick Page’s meticulous pianism. National Orchestra commitments permitting, more broadcasts like this and some solo or chamber music concerts, too, would add much to our musical well-being. Broadcasting, you may have discovered, makes it easy to become an armchair musical traveller. One evening we are sitting in on Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (2YC), and the next night it’s the Canadian Dominion Day broadcast represented by Dr. Healy Willan’s eminently Elgarian Coronation Suite for Choir and Orchestra (YC network). The surprising thing, of course, even in this most surprising of centuries, is that both these musical styles can_live happily side by side-Willan’s ;

suave and comfortable dignity and Schoenberg’s dynamic dissonance. In music, at least, despite this art’s generally accepted universality, we are today, it seems, a long way from achieving one world. Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony broadcast in the same 2YC programme is, incidentally, a work of real beauty and easier on the ears, too, than might be expected. Two interesting programmes this week, interesting not only in the presentation but in the idea behind the programme, were "Songs of the Sea" (2YA), and Bach’s celebrated Chaconne (3YC). Sung ‘by Gerald Christeller and students of the Wellington Teachers’ Training College, with Bob Schmitt on the piano accordion, the sea songs made good listening. Bach’s Chaconne was presented on records in its original form for solo violin by Giocondo de Vito, in Busoni’s piano adaptation by Arturo Michelangelo, and "blown up" for orchestra by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. To be complete, the programme only needed John Sebastian Bach himself to comment on the matter in the style, say, of George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Jacobs, or, perhaps, L. D. Austin.