The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 787, 20 August 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

| ‘THERE'S no place like the fireside on some of these wintry Sunday after‘noons, and what could be better to add a little more warmth than the currently running National Orchestra broadcasts (YA link). To a pleasant programme of Cimarosa, Wolf-Ferrari and Respighi (August 8), Leon Goossens gave further good cheer with brilliant playing of concertos by Vivaldi and-most interesting--Andreae. I think Antonio Vivaldi would have enjoyed Leon Goossens’s playing of his oboe concerto as much as anyone, but he may have been considerably astonished if he had turned to 1YC (August 4) and heard Larry Adler tootling away on one of his concertos with the Vaughan Williams Romance for Harmonica and Strings thrown in for good measure. Who would have thought that our old boyhood friend, the mouth organ, would have risen to the dizzy heights of a YC programme; but then, who in those days would have imagined that ubiquitous instrument played so musically? The Helsinki Sibelius Festival recordings (YC link), broadcast in New Zealand only three weeks after the festival, make impressive listening. These performances confirm again, if confirmation were necessary, that Sibelius’s music still continues to shine brightly in the 20th Century repertoire. Sibelius seems to have stopped composing. Maybe there

lies his greatest wisdom, for there is no sadder spectacle than a waning star, whether it be performer or composer. As it is, Sibelius has become a legend in his own time. Talking about music over the air is not quite so easy as it may seem, One of the problems that faces the speaker is to decide just how much talking will bring the listener and the music together without letting verbosity raise a barrier between the two partners in musical enjoyment, Whether this aspect of the matter occurred to Yvonne Enoch in her Cathedrals of Music series I do not know, but certainly it would seem impossible to cram any more information into a half-hour broadcast. One wonders whether it was all necessary. Arthur Jacobs on "Are Conductors Necessary?" (YC link) made no such mistake, keeping very much to his point and summing up his comments on the, virtuoso exhibitionist conductor by suggesting that we must "first create a more enlightened audience." This is the solution to many musical problems. It was a solution Warwick Braithwaite had in mind, I am sure, iu his excellent down-to-earth Sunday night talk (YA _ link) when he gave his impressions of music in New Zealand. It is rare to come across a musician who can both conduct and talk convincingly. Warwick Braithwaite at least has shown that conductors are not only egneCE but desirable.