Eighty-Fourth Birthday

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 896, 5 October 1956, Page 11

Eighty-Fourth Birthday

N October 12, Vaughan Williams, one of the great English composers, will be 84, and the occasion will be marked by the first broadcast performance in New Zealand of a sonata for violin and piano composed in 1954, It will be performed by Frederick Page (piano) and Francis Rosner (violin), Frederick Page here introduces the work: "THIS sonata is in a curious, austere style and is not an easy work for the player or possibly for the listener. Vaughan Williams has never written a great deal for the piano, he seems to find it intractable, but the few works he has written, notably a concerto for two pianos, and a very interesting Fantasia for chorus and piano, and two small pieces, show that intractable though it be, the composer yet manages to wrest something from the instrument. "It is surprising too, that he should even have turned to the medium of violin and piano, as some musicians argue that this medium itself is an odd mixture, but, as listeners will hear, from this particular sonata comes music that is vigorous and beautiful. It is written in what may be called a late style. A wag has said that Vaughan Williams is writing his posthumous works now. "It is no disparagement of this great man to say that he is probably among the world’s worst pianists and I ‘hope that this fact will not be obvious from

the performance. He always writes sensitively, however, for the violin, an instrument he played with affection as a boy. "The work is in three movements-a Fantasia, a Scherzo, and a Tema con variazioni. The second movement, the scherzo, is an intensely original movement, which seems to look forward to new things. One would like to hear his 8th symphony soon to | hear whether this feeling is taken up in the new work." (Vaughan Williams’s 8th Symphony was given its first performance on May 2 of this year by the Halle Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli. It includes a movement for wind alone, for strings alone, and uses a vast array of percussion instruments.)