The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 24

The Week's Music...

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SEBASTIAN

* + EARLY every day produces something worthwhile in music nowadays. The Fallots continue to give us a fine variety of chamber music with impeccable taste-last good performances included Brahms’s E Minor and F Sonatas, complex pieces of organisation that sounded clear and logical, as though balanced by a musical funambulist on the rope of reason. Then there is William Clausen, now here in person to sing us the lore of many lands (YA, YC link): in live performance he is even more vital than his recordings suggest, and in Latin American types of music his prowess is unexcelled. This is first-rate entertainment, for all altitudes of brow. Last year I noticed Arthur Honegger’s symphonic psalm King David; and it has now had its third local performance (YC link), this time from the Royal Christchurch Musical Society and the National Orchestra under the unflagging baton of Nicolai Malko, whose influence on the performers seems to be a revivifying one, and who can produce marvellous tone from unlikely scores, as we heard on this occasion. Brass and percussion are pre-eminent, typifying in sound the primitive nature of the work, and these departments were at their best, with good style and shorn of rough rhythmic edges. It is odd that with

os similar subjects, attacked in similar manner, this work should be so totally different from Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. The latter is more barbaric and gorgeous, holding in it more of pageantry and less of emotion, and at the same time is closer knit as a whole. King David, on the other hand, stands for the human story as much as that of tribe or religion, and its voices are human voices, and not so much mere specialised instruments. Sybil Phillipps, Mary Pratt and Robin Gordon were all outstanding in their solo parts, which are by no means easy or grateful to sing. So also the choir, which throbbed, rejoiced and lamented with fine rhetorical effect. Special mention to the narrator, William Austin, whose chanted tones cast enchantment, and on whose integrity of performance depended the integrity of the work. Occasionally there was a certain monotony of utterance that became irksome against its emphatic background, but I feel this is mainly the fault of the composer; and with such telling rendering as that of the lament for Saul and Jonathan (or the earlier episode at Endor) I cannot quarrel: at the time it seemed impossible that these words could be treated in any other way. A most impressive performance this, with credit fo all concerned.