The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 794, 8 October 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

HAVE been listening again this week, as I expect you have, to the Alma Trio which has been making will-o-the-wisp dashes the length of the country. It is one of the great virtues of broadcasting that visitors like these three players may be heard by us all beyond the few concerts they are able to give in each centre. This ubiquity of performances may possibly produce a gnawing worry for the artists-or some of them anyway-if they ever remember that all of us can.hear them almost every time, expecting an unwavering consistency of standard. We may expect this, but we do not get it with every artist, or even, perhaps, with the majority of visitors. It is part of the fine musicianship of the Alma Trio that together and \individually they have not only managed a’consistently high standard of playing but have on each occasion managed to fill their music with spontaniety, to make it sound, indeed, as if we were hearing them each time for the first time. The Schubert E Flat Trio (YC link originating at Dunedin) was as fresh as the first time we heard them play it in New Zealand, In fact, this over-long work.sounds shorter and more continuously delightful..at each successive hearing. Gabor Rejto’s Bach Sonata in. the same programme, with Adolph Baller, was superlative, crystalline playing. James Robertson must by now be feeling pretty well at home with his

Players and they with him. That’s the way it seemed, anyhow, in the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra (YC link). Francis Rosner and Eric Lawson as soloists-they are both members of the Orchestragave a musicianly interpretation of Mozart’s music on which they were of one mind, a point of view which seemed to be shared too by conductor and orchestra. Holst’s ballet musi¢ from his comic opera The Perfect Fool, the other composition in this broadcast by the National Orchestra, confirmed again the sureness and originality. of this composer’s orchestral writing. Mr. Robertson brought it off as a real tour de force, The broadcast of the Berlioz Damnation of Faust (YC link) was an introduction to music which the French composer’s growing band of enthusiasts must have welcomed; but you didn’t necessarily have to be one of these to enjoy dhe very fine performance. The oftquoted tag about Berlioz that he had genius but not enough talent to make the most of it, revived in an admirable interval talk by Dr. R. St. Clair Wright, was no more evident than in this work. It had its moments of great beauty and splashes of brilliance but, withal, those occasional blackouts of dullness with which Berlioz lets his listeners down now and again. But a broadcast of extraordinary interest all the same.