The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 801, 26 November 1954, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

ANUEL DE FALLA’S "Ritual Fire Dance" must have been tossed off at one time and another by pretty well everything in the instrumental gamut from the symphony orchestra to the mouth organ. Latest faggot to be thrown on the fire was an effective arrangement by Ken Smith played by the St. Kilda Band (4YA). Brass bands are as typical a New Zealand form of musicmaking as you could name. When they play as interesting- music as St. Kilda did the other night and turn it out as well, you may very well ask why we don’t make more of it. As Falla can be exciting, Fauré can be dull-sometimes, anyhow, and at the hands of the wrong performer. Nancy Weir, visiting pianist, sounded like the right player. Two-nocturnes and an impromptu by Fauré were made imaginatively beautiful. The sonorous tone colours Miss Weir extracted from the piano were just the sort of approach Fauré’s romanticism needs to bring it alive.

I have been trying to keep abreast of Alex Lindsay in his disquisitions on music as a life or living in New Zealand (2YC). Suite in Six Movements he calls his talk series. So far, the movements I have heard seem to be Andante doloroso. In fact, by and large, Mr. Lindsay tends to take a dim view of the professional musician’s prospects in this fair land; and he’s not far wrong, either. "Unsympathetic" and "apathetic" were words that seemed to creep in when he was talking about the average New Zealander’s attitude to music, and "pioneering" when he described the musician’s line of action. Freelancing in music, as Mr. Lindsay pointed out, is a hazardous occupation in New Zealand. You see ‘how it is. Here’s Mr. Lindsay, as he mentioned, giving these talks to put the butter on his bread; and here am I cutting another slice off the same loaf by commenting on his comments. Talk about taking in each other’s washing. After all, it’s just practical social credit, I suppose,