The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 26

The Week's Music...

by

SEBASTIAN

HIS week brought a Grieg anniversary, and we heard a pleasant celebratory programme (NZBS) that revealed at once the man’s power and his limitations. The short pictorial piano pieces were not represented, but a larger work was played by Lola Johnson, the E Minor Sonata, which intersperses the charm and lightness of the short pieces with a near-symphonic thunder. Clear in outline and repetitive in nature, it still demands a good deal of insight in performance, and this it received, though with rather too much cloying nuance, In contrast, a selection of songs from Honor McKellar’s sweet soprano breathed the air of simplicity, and was effective without being affected. This was the composer in his element, and at his most expressive of personal and national feeling. Finally, the Malcolm Latchem Quartet played the G Minor Quartet, a work of beauty but sometimes of tedium as well. Hung upon a single theme, the felicitous mutations of melody are often offset by Grieg’s naive methods of transparent sequence and repetition, satisfying at first, but tending to pall with quantity. Still the lyrical qualities, which made him the Schubert of the North, domin-

ated the performance as well as the work, as they did throughout the programme. It is with dry eyes that I look through the list of recitals that were to have been played by Claudio Arrau. I don’t think we missed very much: he, in common with most . visiting pianists, had obviously decided that we have a humid musical climate. Look at those programmes-the old war horses in close array, the little trifles that are everyone’s encores, that budding pianists struggle with. This, from a man who boasts over 70 different memorised recitals! He would never get by in America with such selections, and the implied attitude is condescending in the extreme. It is all very well for second-rate pianists, who must have an "audience-catcher" programme, to perform these works again and again; but for an artist of Arrau’s calibre, surely people will go to hear the man, even if he plays "difficult" music. You! have only to hear his recordings of Weber to know what he is capable of musically. Perhaps it is as well that Arrau has not come; yet the next visitor may do exactly the same. Enough of spoon feeding! Let us be treated as adults.