The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

HE National Orchestra played Delius’s Brigg Fair at a Wellington lunch-hour concert (2YC) and played it beautifully. It can’t be the easiest thing in the world to settle down to inspired playing when the rest of the world is either eating lunch, standing in a queue at the bank, buying the bread or sitting down in the hall wondering, perhaps, whether they ought to be doing these things. The National Orchestra sounded in this lunch-hour programme as if they had only one thought in the world-to enjoy the music. But to get back to Brigg Fair. This is very much, I think, a conductor’s piece. You can have the best and most sympathetic players in the world, but if the tip of the baton isn’t sensitive to Delius’s amorphous poetry, Delius is likely to lose out. It was James Robertson’s show, therefore, and he made Delius come to life. And what an_- excellent programme this was! My lunch-hour started with the Haydn Symphony, bright and stimulating, and very good for the digestion. Then Brigg Fair and "La Calinda" from Koanga, two movements from Hamilton Harty’s "Irish" Symphony and Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. An informality, proper to the occasion, was added by James Robertson’s introduction to each of the works. At the end of the programme he asked the audience: "If we played the Sibelius Fifth Symphony at the next lunch-hour concert-would you come, or would you

stay away?" I don’t know what the answer was in the Town Hall; but over the air, there was ‘none. There was no answer. This was a bit different from the reaction of the audience at one of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, recordings of which have been going the rounds of the _stations. This programme, played by Sir John Barbirolli and the Halle Orchestra (2YC) was music by Johann and Josef Strauss and Lehar. The enthusiasm of the audience was audibly obvious. When it came to the "Pizzicato Polka" they swayed to the rhythm, said the announcer, and Barbirolli joined in the frolic by playing the piece again and putting the audience off its beat with exaggerated pauses. You know, I think we tend to take our music too seriously. This is not to suggest that we break into a haka next time we listen to a Brahms Symphony, but I think there are times when we could get a lot more fun out of a concert. Doris Sheppard’s playing of iindemith’s Ludus Tonalis (2YC) was a notable broadcast, a first performance in New Zealand, I think. This is not music exactly calculated to calm the fevered spirit or to churn the emotions into ecstasy, but it is. what the composer intended it to be, an excellent exposition of contrapuntal keyboard writing in the modern idiom. The repetition of the broadcast later on in the evening gave listeners an opportunity of getting to grips with music that may not be easy listening, a most commendable move.