A WORLD TO BUILD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 874, 4 May 1956, Page 20

A WORLD TO BUILD

HAT is the duty of the artist surely: to create a world, and so persuade us of its reality that we are drawn into its orbit. If a musician does not do this, however dexterous his technique, he remains an athlete or an acrobat, beguiling us with his skill, but cheating us of the essential experience. By these standards, Richard Farrell must be accounted an artist, for he creates through his composers, a world in whose presence we can make a full surrender. So far, in studio broadcasts, and concert relays, he has sought to make explicit for us the worlds of Schubert, Brahms, Ravel, Liszt and Prokofieff. Let me say at once that he does not create all of these worlds; how could he? For Brahms, at least in the larger set pieces like the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel outlines a realm of heavy Victorian grandeur, touched with the heroic, and it needs an heroic style if it is not to become either soggy or empty. Mr. Farrell's prodigious technique is equal to anything Brahms demands in the purely athletic field, but he does not yet play him with the passion or power that is

necessary, if Brahms is not to be a heavy bore. Julius Katchen last year showed us how enormously stirring Brahms can be when given passion and a sense of the heroic: so far, this is not Mr. Farrell’s world, Nor. is he entirely at home with the golden warmth ‘of Schubert, the Sonata, Op. 143, for example, which Lili Kraus revealed for us so splendidly ten years ago. It is notoriously easy for that warmth to leak away through the notes in a not altogether explicable way, and this is what happened to the Sonata when Mr. Farrell played it last week. But with Ravel, Liszt and Prokofieff, we sre on Mr. Farrell’s home ground, and let me say at once that with these three composers, he is quite wonderful. Gaspard de la Nuit is an immensely difficult suite, Mr. Farrell made nothing of its difficulties, and presented us with a half hour of magic, nothing less, a strange enchanted world both sharp and shimmering; with Liszt, he is no less successful, making the arrangement of the Faust Waltz a glittering, Imperial occasion, absurd and gay, and the Prokofieff Sonata No. 7 he played from Auckland in a dazzlingly crisp style. Immensely sophisticated music, this, with its lively percussion effects and dryly lyrical asides, and Mr. Farrell superbly communicated it, There is no doubt in my mind that Richard Farrell will one day be a great pianist; and that he learnt his first steps among us is a matter in which we all can, I think,

take judicious pride,

B.E.G.

M.