The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 890, 24 August 1956, Page 20

The Week's Music...

by

SEBASTIAN

CELLO soloist is a comparative rarity among artists touring New Zealand, and we have been fortunate in having a worthy exponent of an instrument which, to put it mildly, is capable of ghastly sounds when it loses patience with its player. Harold Beck is primarily an orchestral player, and he seems more at ease with an orchestra than with an accompanist. In studio recitals (YC links) his intonation was sometimes faulty and the tone less sweet than one might expect in, say, his Beethoven Variations. The Schubert Arpeggione Sonata that he essayed was much better and more heaithy-sounding. Yet all the studio work paled into insignificance beside a first-rate rendering of Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the National Orchestra (YC link). It appeared that the harder the task, the more strikingly Mr. Beck rose to the occasion; his cantabile was rich and sonorous, his harmonics true, and his feeling for the musical sense impeccable. I am not saying that the whole performance was blameless, and my enthusiasm was partly engendered by the playing being better than I expected; but it was a virile exposition of a work which could so easily turn salt into saccharine-an abhorrent sort of spurious sweetness. More ofchestra, I think, for Mr. Beck, ‘and rather less piano,. please.

Really, the National Orchestra has | produced some delightful music of late. There was the thoroughly cheeky Suite of Stravinsky, with which my joyespecially at the incorrigible Neapoli-tana-was tempered only with amaze- | ment that such a purely comic piece should be listened to in silence, with no bursts of laughter betraying the presence of any aucience at all. The Australian composer Margaret Sutherland was represented in one programme (YA link) by her Adagio for Two Violins; though well played, the piece seemed to peter out without saying anything very decisive: though it may well improve on closer acquaintance. . The Orchestra then subsided into the familiar strains of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; but with Sir Bernard Heinze interpreting it. as a vast leisurely canvas (rather than the usual helter-skelter tour de forcey new lights shone even from its more worn facets. Finally, one of the treats of the week was the singing of Mary Pratt in Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, with the Auckland Choral Society. Her tone, as round and full as could be wished, clung to the low dark notes as though tailored to fit them; you could go a long way before hearing such another contralto.