The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

GOOD ear, musical intelligenceand it’s handy if you have a good voice. These are prerequisites for the successful singer. To them must be added the most important of all, something that can be developed but never taught-imagination. Most singers who aspire to more discriminating audiences than the bathroom or the drawing-room may offer, will be prepared to lay claim to one or more of these attributes, and it may be that belief in a good voice is commonest. The possession of all four, in any substantial degree, is rare enough to be remarked upon. This is all to record especial enjoyment from three singers in this week’s programmes -Linda Parker, Ronald Dowd and Raymond Windsor. In music from Faust and Carmen, with songs by Lalo and Thomas (two YA link broadcasts), Linda Parker and Ronald Dowd provided fine entertainment with accomplished singing. Raymond Windsor, in a programme of a quite different character, gave distinction to a group of contemporary English songs (1YA). Then there was the National Orchestra conducted by James Robertson, with Cara Hall as soloist in the Mozart Concerto in D Minor (YC link from an Auckland concert). Miss Hall makes a welcome return to the New Zealand scene, Her playing is as fluent as we remembered it; but, with the microphone between us and the playing, it seemed as if some of the point of this

concerto may have been missed. This, among all Mozart’s piano concertos, demands emotional depth and more than a suspicion of the dramatic. The Sibelius Symphony No. 5 in E Flat, which opened the second half of the programme (1YC), was fine. Listening to Masters of Melody, a BBC programme introducing the music of Haydn Wood (2ZB), reminded one that composers of good light music, good in that it grips the popular ear and remains there; are hardly more to be found than successful composers of any other sort of music: The tunes of the septuagenarian Haydn Wood may rarely if ever rise above the obvious, but he has always had a flare for putting them together and, furthermore, for making them sound well in an orchestral setting that when other popular music has flutteréd to the four winds "A Brown Bird Singing" and other friends are still with ety per Gra A new contemporary work that we almost missed. was the young Scottish composer Ian Hamilton’s Symphony No. 2, presented in a Henry. Wood Promenade programme by Sir Adrian. Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra (2¥C). This work won the Koussevitzky Prize in 1951 and was first performed at a Cheltenham Festival. Although there seemed to be Some unnecessary banging of gongs and other percussion, this gave the impression of being powerful music, music certainly, that could do with a second hearing.