The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 785, 6 August 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

MAPAME FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS, John Gray’s surprise packet in this month’s New Records (YC link), must be the world’s most unappreciated singer, though not necessarily the least enjoyed. In order that her art should be remembered by posterity, Madame Jenkins arranged to have some of it preserved on records, the production of which, I gather, was financed by herself. If you did not hear Florence Foster Jenkins, no description of her efforts can possibly convey the impression she leaves on the imagination. Suffice to say that she manages to achieve a musical surrealism surpassing even the best of Anna Russell’s masterpieces of caricature. Her representation of Mozart’s "Queen of the Night" aria was the failure of a dream, the realisation of a nightmare or a fantasy of farce, depending on your sympathies towards singers in general or how much you are prepared to let Mozart suffer in the interests of brightening up the world a bit. "People may say I couldn’t sing," Madame Florence Foster Jenkins is reported to have said, "but no one can say I didn’t sing." With this epitaph Madame Jenkins may very well become the patron saint of all frustrated vocalists, Bela Siki’s first New Zealand performance of Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto with the National Orchestra (YC link) was an exciting addition to our listening repertoire. Played cleanly and imaginatively, with sympathetic partnership from the Orchestra, it sounded

fine in the Wellington Town Hall, If the broadcast. was as impressive it must have considerably énlivened the Saturday night listening. What those who braved the wild weather to go to the concert did miss was an interval talk on the concerto by David Farquhar which, by all accounts, filled to perfection those difficult minutes in an extended relay. The first of Frederick Page’s broadcasts of the six Bach French Suites on the clavichord may not have produced many difficulties for Mr. Page, who knows his Bach very well, but may have set the technicians a problem or two. It was probably a toss-up between putting the microphone near enough to the instrument to catch the genuine quality of the clavicord’s delicate tone and keeping it out of earshot of the noise of the tangents falling on the strings. The result was a fair enou compromise, a little adjustment of the tradio’s tone control and some imagination, too, compensating for a liveliness which tended to make the sounds rather more than life-size. Further adjustment on the other side of the microphone will give us music of incomparable charm. Notes in passing: Good tone and bright rhythms contributing to some delightful singing from the Otago Girls’ igh School Special Choir in madrigals and contemporary part-songs (4YA); some attractive playing of Schumann by Lola Johnstone (pianist) in Path. ways of Music (2YA).