The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

"\YOU musn’t regard this test as the last test of your life, and give up the ghost if you don’t come first. Keep on working. It’s all a matter of discovery, and a flowing of the inner nature after everything else has been done. You are not _ finished-only started." This was some of the wisdom with which Miss Dorothy Davies, judge of the Auckland Competitions Society Piano Concerto Contest (1YC) preceded her announcement of the award. No doubt the build-up, the prize, the excitement of the competition itself are all incentives to higher standards of piano playing, but the value of the actual result is somewhat illusory for the qualities needed to be first past the post in such a contest are special ones. Some have them by a sort of heavensent dispensation. Others have to acquire them the hard way as the fruits of failure. These have to learn by experience. To them Miss Davies’s sympathetic advice may have been worth more than the first prize. One of the things Miss Davies looked for in choosing the winner was "sureness." The successful competitor, Diana Stevenson, certainly played with assurance, her performance of the test piece -Beethoven’s Concerto No. 3 in C Minor-having an air of conviction which made for most enjoyable listening. Encouragement is a good thing and the ability to triumph over adversity and failure among the greatest of qualities for success, but one sometimes won-' ders what words of wisdom could or should be given to those young musi-

cians who, flushed -with enthusiasm, have gone overseas and worked, and worked again; and still find themselves on the debit side of the ledger. Something of this sort occurred to me after listening to several of the London New Zealand Society’s broadcasts (YC link). It's no use beating about the bushsome of the performances have been lamentable (no names, no pack drill). It seemed at times that leaving aside those few who were obviously on the crest of the wave, the compilers of the programme were at times scraping the bottom of the barrel and not finding much: of the "inner nature" there. Maybe those are the ones who didn’t keep on working. Let them be a lesson to us. One felt a little disconsolate, after hearing Moeran’s String Quartet in A Minor (1YC) played by the String Quartet of the Auckland Chamber Music School (Glynne Adams, Elsa Jensen, Winifred Stiles and Valmai Moffett), This was a quite superb perform-ance-plenty of verve and glowing tone. The disconsolateness is occasioned by the fact that now the Auckland holiday music school is over, these four musicians will disperse to various parts of New Zealand to their bread-and-butter jobs; and that’s that. So many good musical things seem to start in New Zealand, and then, for one reason or another, fizzle out. One way out of the difficulty would be to take all the best musicians and put them in some place like Tokoroa, just as all the thermal wonders are in Rotorua. When one wanted music, one would arrange for a salubrious holiday in this tourist spot and stay for a week, two weeks, or for ever. ,