11th EDINBURGH FESTIVAL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 944, 13 September 1957, Page 8

11th EDINBURGH FESTIVAL

LAST week Edinburgh saw the end of its eleventh International Festival, and.the successful entry into the second decade as a world festival centre. Though the 1957 programme was as international in flavour as in other years, one mark of the new decade was the evidence of the organisers’ policy of giving a little extra prominence at each Festival to one particuJar nation-this year, the new policy, however, was more apparent in the ballet and drama; the Festival concerts preserved the wide variety-both of programmes and per-formers-that listeners have come to expect from Edinburgh.

Last year the BBC offered airmailed tapes of the Festival concerts to the Commonwealth; this year they have done the same, and listeners will hear the first of these recorded programmes from all YCs at 7.30 p.m., Sunday, September 22. The orchestra in this programme is the Bavarian Radio Symphony, conducted by Eugen Jochum, with the 31-year-old Canadian soprano Lois Marshall as soloist singing "Four Last Songs" by Richard Strauss. Lois Marshall made her first English appearance last May in the Royal Festival Hall with the Royal Philharmonic under Sir Thomas Beecham, who described her as "the biggest winner for years." Before this she had spent some four years touring the United States and Canada, where she appeared with all the leading orchestras. The orchestral works in this first broadcast programme are Hindemith’s Symphonic Dances, and the Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68, by Brahms. Last year, when the Rumanian-born pianist Clara Haskil returned to U.S. concert halls after a 30-years’ absence, she met with immediate acclaim. Of her performance of Beethoven’s Third Concerto one critic wrote: "One of those magical revelations that occurs in music once in a generation . . . the most beautiful performance I have ever heard or expect to hear again." Born in 1890, Clara Haskil made her debut in Vienna at the age of nine, and later won a Grand Prix at the Paris Conseryatoire. After the First World War

illness forced her into temporary retirement; later she began playing sonatas with world recognised figures such as Ysaye, Enesco and Casals. She will be heard in a Festival recital of sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, at 7.30 p.m., Tuesday, September 24, from all YCs. Another soloist to be heard among the first of these programmes from Edinburgh is the pianist Rudolf Firkusny, giving the first European performance of a new work by his fellow Czech, Buhuslav Martinu. Firkusny, who is now a U.S. citizen, was born in 1912 in a village near Brno, in Moravia. His musical ability showed itself at an early age, and from the age of six until he was 14, he was taught by Leos Janacek, who then superintended his

enrolment at the Prague Conservatory. In 1933 Firkusny spent the summer as a master pupil of the late Artur Schnabel, this period marking the end of his long apprenticeship. Like many another European, the war meant a loss of country to Firkusny, and it has been said that he plays nothing with quite the same love as he does "those works in which he hears the songs of his youth." He thus makes an exclusive province of the works of Dussek, Vorisek, Dvorak, Smetana, his teacher Janacek, and-

more recently-Martinu (YCs, Friday, September 27). During the following weeks listeners will hear a number of other programmes from the Festival, including solo recitals, orchestral works and chamber music. Other individual names to be mentioned are Victoria de los Angeles, who (accompanied by Gerald Moore) will sing works by Scarlatti, Handel, Schubert, Brahms, Stravinsky, Duparc, and others, including works by Spanish composers; Szymon Goldberg

(violin), who will play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam; and Nina Milkina (piano), who will be heard with the BBC Scottish Orchestra in A Concert for Young People, playing the Beethoven Concerto No. 1 and the Mozart "Haffner." In the field of intimate music the Dennis Brain Wind Ensemble will be heard playing works by Beethoven, Malipiero, Dukas and Fricker, and in Musica Scotica the Saltire Singers, Jacobean Ensemble and Thurston Dart (harpsichord) present a programme of _ early Scottish Chamber Music for voices and_ instruments.