Triumph

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 933, 28 June 1957, Page 14

Triumph

EALLY, music in New Zealand goes from peak to peak. The. latest to be scaled is the Verdi Requiem Mass, a work of supreme splendour and enormous technical difficulty. What chance would we have had of hearing it ten years ago, or even five? Yet orchestra, choir and soloists compounded to give us an evening of authentic, thrilling majesty. The Mass has been much criticised for its theatricality and for its secular warmth. It is perhaps odd to hear a Mass in a concert hall, to hear the Libera Me greeted with thunderous applause, to find the Dies Irae so barbarically thrilling, to find the whole work so intoxicatingly beautiful. But surely a Requiem Mass is, by its essence, the most powerful of all dramas? I cannot be doing with such objections: I shall pass to performance, James Robertson marshalled his formidable forces with all the skill we have came to expect. The Christchurch Harmonic Society, without doubt the most sensitive choir in the country, was in splendid form; the orchestra performed its difficult tasks with grace and feryour as these qualities were in turn called on, and the four soloists, assembled, as it were from the four corners, performed in fine sympathy. Superb in the Lacrymosa, they performed their solos, duets, and trios with

the spacious musical feeling and sense of drama combined, without which the work cannot live. Over the whole performance, there lay nothing stunted or tentative; an authentic largeness both of mind and feeling came over to us. We need size in New Zealand; my salutations to all who made it possible.