The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 811, 11 February 1955, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

SEBASTIAN

| HE highlight of last week as far as I was concerned was one of John Gray’s proteges in his monthly review New Records, none othér than our old friend Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, transcribed for piano and orchestra by the maestro himself. It seemed totally pianistic, and it was difficult at times to remember how the solo violin used to fit in. After years of hearing the violin version this was a refreshing change, the more so for being unexpected. I hope we shall hear more of Beethoven’s Sixth Piano Concerto. I don’t appear to have much of a dossier on Dossor, a new planet that is swimming into our ken on an NZBS tour. I gather Lance Dossor is a professor of piano from Australia, and that he has entertained the troops on occasion overseas. Apart from this, only his playing can inform me. Apparently his programmes are designed to show his versatility, since the first was based on Haydn and Brahms, the second Chopin, and the third French composers; this plan fell a little flat, because all these received approximately the same type of treatment, including a rather overweighted bass. I did like his Haydn, especially since it was the free-for-all D major Sonata, which a theatre agent wou!d probably describe as a riot of fun. None of the fun was lost, and the clarity was what one always imagines for Haydn. Less

happy were the Brahms-Paganini Variations, which suffered sometimes from a surfeit of sentiment, and from a complete lack of climax. The Chopin programme included a fiery performance of the little-played B minor Scherzo, but the rest of it lacked something of the expected delicacy, not excepting the misty traceries of the Berceuse. In this programme Lance Dossor’s playing sounded rather workaday, as though he were trying to inspire the music rather than let it inspire him, He made up for this in the next recital with a spirited performance of the -lifficult Fairy-tale Sonata of Nicholas Medtner (the Cinderella of modern music) and some pleasant Poulene and Debussy. This has been a good week for Schu-bert-apart from two or three recorded symphonies and some chamber music, there was another competently-recorded and conscientiously posthumous piano sonata from David Galbraith (YC link), and the Violin and Piano Sonata in A Minor, Op. 137, No. 2, from Vivien Dixon and Frederick Page (2YC). The latter I thought was just right-clear and melodious, like all the best Schubert. Anyone would think he was having an anniversary, though in point of fact this shouldn’t occur till November 19. Still, let’s not deny him the fair play and fairer playing that he failed to aot during his lifetime.