The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 924, 26 April 1957, Page 30

The Week's Music...

by

SEBASTIAN

LITTLE debunking is good for all Serious-minded artists and audiences, since no art can be free from its own particular cults of snobbery. Orchestras must get tired of their serried ranks of owl-like listeners who, after the concert become the high-toned critics and the vapid gushers. Thus it was with a keen anticipation that I listened to the Hoffnung Music Festival (YC link) presented in the Royal Festival Hall Jast year: Gerard Hoffnung being a musical debunker of the first water through the medium of his cartoons, with which most people are familiar, I must confess I was rather disappointed, though had I been present at that fantastic performance I would have been rolling in the aisles with the rest of the audience. Much of the humour was too obviously visual, and there were too ‘many unexplained guffaws which depended on stage "business" during apparently innocuous passages. To descend to detail, Dennis Brain’s playing of the hosepipe was far too good to be very rib-tickling; and the setting of "Young Lochinvar" for readers and percussion was somewhat pawky humour, and could not have enthralled many tin-pan addicts. Malcolm Arnold’s Grand Grand Overture was a perfectly formal piece in his high spirited manner, and its protracted close

merely an extension (or explosion) of an idea Beethoven exploited over a century ago; while its barbaric instru-ments-vacuum cleaners and _ floor polisher-created hardly an auditory ripple on that vast orchestral sea. On the credit side, Gordon Jacob’s brilliant variations (for some outlandish wind instruments) on "Annie Laurie" were well worth hearing: and his inclusion of serpents lent to the work a sound as of ships that groan in the night. Superimpose a Lisztian Hungarian dace, and you may have some shocking idea of the effect. The Concerto to end Concertos was a howling success, its ingenious plan being that piano and orchestra consistently disagree as to which piece they are supposed to be playing, reaching no real decision: a first-class piece of aural wit. Finally, the Surprise Symphony left no tones unturned, no surprises untouched, from the wrong keys to the wrong instruments; had the rest been up to this standard I would have liked it all. As it was, however grateful we may be to Hoffnung and company, they have stilt much to learn from artists like Victor Borge and Anna Russell, who can make their music both amusing and clever without leaning heavily on the visual element.