Studio Concert

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 911, 25 January 1957, Page 14

Studio Concert

HE studio concert on YC link last week, conducted by James Robertson, was really most enjoyable. Only three works were performed, and the main offering, the Prokofieff Piano Concerto No. 3, was outstanding from many points of view. Richard Farrell seemed the obvious choice for soloist when he was on his last tour, but Janetta McStay made a wonderful job of it, making regrets for this or that soloist, needless, It is a formidably taxing part technically; Miss McStay made light of its difficulties, and played through it with splendid assurance. Her tone in the first movement, which demands steely fingers quite to bring off its liveliness, was a little too warm and slack for my taste, but the lyrical passages towards the end of the movement, and in the whole of the entrancing second, she played most beautifully. The orchestra was _ throughout spirited and suave, as these qualities were by turn called upon. Another work was a Handel overture, Theodora, atranged by Gordon Jacob. Mr. Jacob evidently has not needed the (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) lessons available from his master in this genre, Sir Thomas Beecham, whose arrangement of The Faithful Shepherd suite, from Handel, should serve as a model for all such ventures. The scoring is soupy, and overpoweringly rich; the orchestra gave us, quite properly, a tone of great sweetness and amplitude, but the final effect was gummy. The last work was John Antill’s ballet © suite Corroboree. On ‘a first hearing, it is rhythmically most ingenious, but in atmospheric effect, it seemed to owe far more to Respighi than to a genuine feeling for the Australian landscape. I feel that its divorce from the occasion which gave it birth is an unhappy one, but it was worth hearing, and well worth playing.