The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 796, 22 October 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

, by

OWEN

JENSEN

‘HE especial pleasure about Australian soprano Linda Parker’s first broadcast on this NZBS tour (YA link) was that she had the happy knack of seeming to bring the music right into the room. It is surprising how still, in so much of our listening, we have, in imagination, to go out to the concert hall. While it may be a bit of all right, as the boys would say, toe have all the fun of the concert hall without having to stir from the comfort of the old armchair, there’s a lot to be said for having one’s music at home, part and parcel of the domestic scene. Linda Parker’s informa} introductions to her numbers and the fact that you knew she was playing her own accompaniments gave the impression, not only that she was entertaining you but that she was in an insubstantial way a guest for the evening. Naturally, the very agreeable singing and the programme --- some Gaelic songs and a little 19th century pleasantness with a piano solo of a Chopin waltz thrown in for good measure-were a considerable contribution to the enjoyment. We could have more of this. Then there’s Ronald Dowd, also from Australia and as good a tenor as we have had here for a long time. His singing

of a group of Mozart arias (YC link) was fine. His voice suits Mozart (why didn’t we hear him in the Australian Opera’s I] Seraglio?) and his musicianship gave the music the style it asks for; and what a pleasure to hear alj the words too. Linda Parker played the accompaniments-these arrangements of operatic arias are not easy to bring offmost assuredly a versatile artist. The Schola Cantorum’s singing of Pa:torale by Arthur Bliss (2YC) was quite a virtuoso bit of work. Bliss’s piece for choir, string orchestra and solo flute makes very beautiful music, but it needs singers who ate completely certain of their intonation, an orchestra responsive to the flexible phrasing and the subtle colouring of the mu ic, and a flautist who can not only get round the notes but put them together with the artistry that the music requires. This performance had all these. Stanley Oliver has, over the years, welded the Schola. Cantorum into a magnificent choral instrument, and the pity is that we hear these singers. so seldom. On this occasion .they’ were fortunate in having the efficient assistance of the Alex Lindsay String Orchestra. James Hopkinson made an aftist’s job of his solo flute part.