CONDUCTED BY NICOLAI MALKO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 989, 1 August 1958, Page 4

CONDUCTED BY NICOLAI MALKO

HE surest way for an artist to obtain rough treatment in the Press is to tell an interviewing journalist exactly -what to write. When these directions extend as far as the exact location of new paragraphs, semi-colons and other punc--tuation marks, he is inviting what the Americans aptly call a "hatchet job." Yet, to our astonishment, one man has upset this rule and escaped unscathed. He is the National Orchestra’s very distinguished guest conductor, Nicolai Andreievitch Malko, an elderly gentleman so wilful yet benign, so determined yet disarming, that no person of lesser years or talent can do other than rise when he enters the room and listen Tespectfully to whatever he cares to say. Before taking over the conduct of the interview, however, Dr Malko permitted one question. Was it he we had seen at Anna Russell’s recent concert? It was. "It is not necessary," he reminded us, "to be always gloomy or serious if a ‘talented person can make us’ smile or laugh." And what did Dr Malko think of such joyous hatchet jobs as that which Miss Russell performs upon Wagner’s opera The Ring? There was no direct reply, but the conductor’s benign" smile broadened. "Tt is no secret that in the eae a to Wagner there is some hypocrisy," he informed us. "I remember at Bayreuth you are playing and you hear a bump from the audience. You hear opera glasses fall to the floor as somebody falls asleep! "Wagner had a way of megaloniania, the idea of grandeur, about him. Verdi and Mozart are more really lyrical in their approach to musical theatre. Their way is more natural. Musical theatre is

born when talking is not enough, but when my emotions produce organised speech, on musical intonations, that is the start of melody. It always must be naturally expressive, naturally emotional -and if some fan of Wagner will tell me that his operas or musicdramas are natural, I would doubt his sincerity." Gently, the hand which so expertly controls a symphony orchestra waved our next question into limbo. "I had in Australia," he began without further’ ado, "sood reports about the National Orchestra and its new conductor John Hopkins, which my impression at rehearsal has confirmed. The Orchestra is progressing. This you know is my second visit; I was here last year.

"One of the good reports I got from the violinist David Oistrakh, who plaved with me last

week in two concerts at Sydney. David Oistrakh asked me: ‘Do you remember you were guest conductor in Odessa, and I was sitting on the last desk of violins?’ I forgot it. Then he asked: ‘Do you remember you came again to Odessa and I was your concertmaster?’ I forgot it, too. Then he asked ‘Do you remember

my first appearance as soloist and you conducted?’ This I remember very well. Oistrakh reminded me how he played for me in a private house in Odessa and ‘that afterwards I invited him to be my soloist with the Leningrad Philharmonic. And it was ... 30 years ago, in October, 1928, that he played the Concerto by

Tchaikovski which he played again with me now in Sydney." Dr Malko himself was born in 1883 in Tchaikovski’s home town, Brailov, in the Ukraine, and lived for seven years in the Tchaikovski house there. He studied at St Petersburg Conservatoire with Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, Glazounov and Tcherepnin, later becoming a professor at the same _ institution-by then the Leningrad Conservatoire-and conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. From there he moved to South Russia and later to Europe, England and the U.S. He is now an American citizen. "I left Russia many years ago," he told us, "but now I’m glad to say that they have asked me to come back as a guest conductor." He is at present resident conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Discussing his concerts here, Dr Malko touched on the pieces from Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, which was once denounced in Russia as "bourgeois and decadent." "It certainly is one of the more complicated and modern works," says Dr Malko, "but if we touch on the question of modern, — bourgeois’ or formalistic music, we are lost in two minutes. I can say, though, that when David Oistrakh heard these pieces just now in Sydney he was not just happy, he was enthusiastic about them." t occurred to me,". continued Dr Malko, specifying a new paragraph for the purpose, "that I was the first performer .of the First Symphony by Shastakovich, and that I really launched that composer as I did David Oistrakh, and I’m not sorry that I did." Dr Malko looked forward to his New Zealand concerts. "I tell you without any exaggeration," he says, "that the musical activity of Australia and New Zealand is astonishing."