The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 949, 18 October 1957, Page 24

The Week's Music...

by

SEBASTIAN

ss > HERE appears to be a modern British tendency to ignore the men who made her music the powerful force it is today; Parry and Stanford, for instance, Delius and Elgar to some extent, and Holst. Especially Holst; huge numbers of his vocal works lie unopened and unperformed, and even the great Hymn of Jesus‘has had scant attention from the recording companies. Still, there is one work of his that will continue to command respect and performances, the orchestral suite The Planets, an immense astrological venture requiring outsize forces and a conductor with four arms. Its mature and origin make it a suite of moods and sympathies, in an all-embracing symphonic style of great brilliance. We had the fortune to hear a local performance of this work (YC link) when the National Orchestra presented it, conducted by James Robertson (who, being forewarned, was presumably fourarmed), in a cavaleade of sonorous pictures that were as impressive as anything I have heard from them. Singers of the Hutt Valley Orpheus Choir added materially to the ethereal .sounds that delineate Neptune’s mysticism, but for the rest the credit is all with the Orchestra. Jupiter has rarely been so bucolic-with his lucid moments, of

course-nor Uranus so utterly geriatric; one could understand why the latter is such an unpopular movement with the middle-aged. My only criticism would be levelled at monitoring that seemed to make extremes of sound insufficiently extreme: for the Martian and Jovian noise that should rock walls merely trembled my speaker a little. Even this is a criticism of the medium, an implied indictment of non-concert-goers, including myself this time. The Planets is a work that should be heard in the flesh to make its full impact, notwithstanding the magnificent recordings extant. Another first performance from the Orchestra recently was Larry Pruden’s Dances of Brittany (NZBS), which the composer conducted, The music itself is gay, not too complex to appeal nor too simple to bear listening. It sounded English as much as Breton, in spite of the Gallic turn of melody; but I think these pieces are an advance on his Soliloguy for Strings, and should certainly find their niche in future Youth Concert programmes, The remaining work in this concert was Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, whose inimitable exploits came through with clarity and verve, amid prodigious efforts from wind and percussion. A noisy conclusion, but satisfying.