Youth at the Proms

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 916, 1 March 1957, Page 9

Youth at the Proms

"Pretty good, this chap, isn’t he?" "You mean Bishop or Beethoven?" "Bishop, you ass." ’ "Rather. Quite the Elvis Presley of the symphony, so to speak." OMETIMES after and even during a thrilling orchestral performance you can feel the excitement building in the audience. The excitement of the Prom. audience, though, begins all of its own accord .before a single note of the concert is heard. You can sense it in the crowd streaming in downstairs, with cushions and rugs under their arms, with beaming smiles and excited -chatter. It isn’t there quite the same in the audience going into the reserved seats in the gallery. They’re older, more staid, dressed more conventionally, and in these days of high temperatures, far less sensibly. "The only improvement on lying back like this listening to musié would be to have it in the open air." "In Wellington’s winds?" "Well, you could put the wood-wind out of the wind in the wood." "Very funny!"

Girls in bright dresses, girls in dresses with no backs, girls with bare feet, girls looking cool in a hot hall. Men much more conventional (poor creatures). White shirt with tie the most common uniform. One group of six young men listening in concentrated attention and all wearing this form of clothing were so much alike they might have been sextuplets. But I didn’t see a Hawaiian shirt. Some men looking too too English with that carelessly looped scarf at the throat; unfortunately, I knew them all to be New Zealanders. One genuine young. English composer looking far more like a New Zealander than he had a right to look. "But, my deah, of course I know there are people to whom these old war-horses of music must be fresh, but really, they’re not in our circle." : "When did you hear the Pastoral Symphony last?" "Well, now that you come to menoS Teper ad Methods of coping with the hard floor varied: hedonists lounged on li-los. The well-prepared brought little back-sup-porters of the kind you see on beaches. The thoughtful had rugs. The rest just sat. Our most distinguished composer too sat on the hard floor with the others. But then, his compositions have always shown a firm bass. "Frighttully complicated things orchestras, aren’t they? Think of all the things that could go wrong and don’t." "Well, what I think marvellous is all the different techniques they use. They tell me that even to bash a couple of cymbals together is as tricky as anything." From where I sit in the Wellington Town Hall I look down on the audience in the promenade section. There was something different about them and I couldn’t quite think what it was. It wasn’t the bright dress, the lounging or the cushions. Then I realised what it was-no bald heads! At least, the first night I saw one, the second night, two. The third night I was down there myself, so there. must have been at least one, But this is, I think, a fair indica-

tion of the change in character of the Prom. audience. "Bishop’s not quite so talkative as Robertson,.is he?" "But it’s jolly good to hear them talk. Makes you feel a bit closer, more personal, you know what I mean." "Well, what he says is certainly to the point. Good, that playing of a couple of bits of the Pastoral before they began it." The break at the interval for a cool drink makes all the difference to the young people in the promenade sectionyouth never likes to be long: separated from food. And they stream’ out glad that Wellington now has at least a few places where you can get gdod coffee after a concert. "Jolly good, that chap announcing that some people were putting the names of girls in the orchestra where it said ‘What is your favourite piece." "What did you put on that paper about your favourite compositions?" "Well, actually, I filled in two. On one I put in what I thought, but on the other I just said ‘I hate music.’ " I was interested to hear what the young people thought of the programme. Little scraps of conversation floated to the ear during the interval, and after the concert. The surprise to me, and evidently to some of the youngsters themselves, was the impact of the old standard works of the concert programme. I heard one group discussing with some vigour their opinions of the two chief. works of the previous concert, the Prokofieff Piano Concerto and the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony. They had expected to be excited by the modern work and to take the classical one much more calmly; actually it turned out to be the other way around. One could see this during that concert from the rapt attention which the young audience gave to the Beethoven-the Old Master still

shows his strength.

D.

M.