Still Falls the Rain

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 896, 5 October 1956, Page 22

Still Falls the Rain

HE Aldeburgh Festival programme last week included a work that impressed me very deeply, Canticle No. 2, Still Falls the Rain, the poem by Edith Sitwell, set to music by Benjamin Britten. What a remarkable young man Britten is! The Aldeburgh Festival crystallises round his splendid series of talents, as pianist, composer, conductor, and genius loci, for Aldeburgh, I understand, is where he spent his boyhood. The canticle, for horn, voice and piano, -is @ memorial to the Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood, who died tragically some years ago, I heard Mewton-Wood as a very young man during.the war, and could therefore agree with Britten’s moving spoken tribute to an artist of genius. Edith Sitwell’s poem is subtitled The Raids, 1940, Night and Dawn, and it is one of her finest works, equating the sufferings of the world with those of "the Starved Man hung upon the Cross." Horn and voice do not play together until the last verse; the earlier ones consist of voice and piano, with bridge passages for piano and horn, Peter Pears’s voice is not golden, but it

has an odd unmistakable sheen at its best, and most compelling it was, tracing the long threads of the slow, involuted melody, with only a few perfect fifths from the piano as accompaniment. Dennis Brain, who must be one of the world’s finest players on the French horn, certainly England’s best, has a tone of great refinement and eloquence, I find it difficult to do justice in words to this deeply moving threnody; I hope therefore that there will be many chances of hearing it again.