The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 816, 18 March 1955, Page 10

The Week's Music...

by

SEBASTIAN

NORMALLY I shut the window when when a band practice happens to be in progress nearby, and I have never thought the euphonium the most euphonious instrument, while the strains of the sweet cornet rarely move me to tears. Yet a National Band Contest is a very different kettle of fish, and I heard the winning performances (YA link) with every appearance of enjoyment. Especially good was the A Grade Test, the Second Rhapsody on Negro Spirituals by Eric Ball, who was also adjudicating; these old tunes were deftly woven into the brass fabric, with a splodge of jazz to brighten the edges, and, in the case of the winners, came off resoundingly. Almost as successful was a rather more old-fashioned piece, the Thames Valley Suite by Henry Gale, a light tone poem which received several pleasant performances, with as many contrasts as a brass band has at its dis-posal-which is more than one might imagine. I’m glad I didn’t miss the last Auckland Prom (YC link), since it contained the Debussy Rhapsody for Saxophone and Orchestra, in which the soloist was George Hopkins. This "testimonial to ‘the instrument,"’ as Owen Jensen called it, was full of Debussy at his most plaintive and whole-tonal (very Apresmidi), but not without plenty of Gallic

good humour and the peculiarly pagan noises which a saxophone can be made to produce. All in all, a fascinating mixture, the more so in the hands of this particular expert. Later the Orchestra shifted to Wellington, ‘gathering fresh soloists into its fold. Robin Gordon’s tenor I have admired for some eight years now, and it has rarely shown to better advantage or with truer intonation and tone, than on this occasion in the Flower. Song from Bizet’s Carmen. In the same concert, the pianist Jocelyn Walker was soloist in the Saint-Saens (however you pronounce him) G Minor Concerto; this work has never entirely pleased me-it has been aptly compared with a trip from the cathedral to the pub-but there was nothing displeasing about the playing in this case: the audience were obviously of the same opinion. A nice bit of programming from 3YC Tecently brought Cara Cogswell with her smooth contralto singing a bracket of Liszt songs, preceded by an equally smooth NZBS recording of Bela Siki playing the same composer’s B Minor Piano Sonata, with the expertise and brilliance that we would expect» of him. If all stations took this care with the surroundings-or should I say back-ground?--of their studio recitals, the ether would carry. fewer unpleasantlymixed bags of an evening.