Last Concert

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 891, 31 August 1956, Page 20

Last Concert

AM happy to report that at Sir Bernard Heinze’s last concert in Wellington the National Orchestra was at the top of its form, Only three works

were given, the Hamilton Harty version of Handel’s Royal Fireworks, the Beethoven Triple Concerto, and the Sibelius Second Symphony, The Handel spanked along with all the proper fizz and sparkle, the strings were mellow, and the trumpets clean and precise. All very lively, invigorating, and wholesome. The Beethoven had as soloists three members of the Robert Masters Quartet. It is a seldom played work, and it is good to have heard it. Musically, it seems to me much inferior to the piano concertos; the first movement is wearily extended, and the last is commonplace. The second movement, characteristic of what a friend is pleased to call Beethoven's Salvation Army mood, had I thought a dark, noble gravity. The cello part is enormously difficult, and.Muriel Taylor made a splendid job of it. Robert Masters, violin, made it clear how grateful to this work are his years of chamber playing; in long, intricate passages with the cello, the two instruments were always impeccably together. The piano, less spectacularly written for, was played with style and discretion by Kinloch Anderson. But the plum of the evening was undoubtedly Sibelius. This old giant .of forest and snow, of vast empty lJand- scapes, creates a world with which we feel much akin; we seem imaginatively to enter those alien, beautiful spaces with the same awe that those of us who have read Mr. Holcroft enter our forests and climb our mountains. The orchestra gave us a tone of great amplitude and richness, and the last movement, with its tormentingly delayed climax, until finally we were launched into the splendid sea of the last long tune, was the most exciting moment I have had in listening for a long time. What an error, though, to play that sugar sweet encore! Who wants to go to bed humming Bocchetini?