Music for a Dominion

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 948, 11 October 1957, Page 25

Music for a Dominion

‘| Re NZBS made a handsome progtamme for its Dominion Day celebration, and the musical quality of the works by New Zealand composers was of retnarkable maturity, in itself a striking index to New Zealand's coming = of age. Gabrielle -_- Phillips, soptaho, sang with Gwyneth Brown, piano, six songs to poems of various petiods, by David Farquhar. They were all distinguished by a spaciousness of harmony which tfecalled, though was nowhere detivative from, the early Douglas Lilburn. I have feservations about the treatment of Geratd Manley Hopkitis’s em, "Spring and Fall," feeling, at first hearing, that rhythmieally the song worked against the poem, and that the last two lines were overrhetorical for the quiet but shattering knowledge with which the poem ends. I had not heard Douglas Lilburni’s music to Allen Curnow’s "Landfall in Unknown Seas" before, and found it wholly engaging. Beautifully scored for strings, shapely, urgent, and eloquent, it is a work of great and enduring distinction. William Austin’s reading of the poem was sensitive afd immaculete, except for a curious inflexion on the words Golden Bay towaftds the end. The programme ended with three piano pieces played by Peter Cooper. Owen Fletcher’s "Thuringian Dance" was neat and pretty, Georg Tintner’s

Prelude showed the evidence of a deeply musical imagination, but Mr Cooper’s own Waltz in Memory of Ignaz Friedman was vulgar. and flashy, and a severe let-down to a programme elsewhere of such high quality. But as a whole, the evening made me glow with chauvinistic pride.