Out of the Steppes
ROM a book I had been reading which suggested that the immense flat expanses of Russia lulled the eye only to intensify the imagination, I turned back in memory to a vivid story by Tchekhoy which tells of a young boy travelling across these very steppes, and thence I moved to consider the alternately exalted and depressed egos so noticeable in Dostoevsky’s novels. Through these thoughts I at length came, peculiarly well fitted, I should think, to listen to a fine rendering of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, played by Cyril Smith (piano) and the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra over 3YC. I seemed to see the vast horizon, and the sedgy lakes, the slow birth of a storm in the blackening cloud. This solitude breeds drama, I thought. And in at least two Russian composers, Tchaikovski and Rachmaninoff, it is the dramatic element which appeals to me more than the angelic lyricism of, say, Mozart. The "I" is poised in tension against a vast solitude,
and there finds all its hopes and fears magnified a hundredfold. Standing on the threshold of silence the soul breaks into a storm, and that storm is the dramatic music of Rachmaninoff.
Westcliff
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540910.2.17.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 11
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203Out of the Steppes New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 11
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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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