EDINBURGH FESTIVAL 1959

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 4

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL 1959

‘AT the Edinburgh Festival even serious music has a ceremonial importance if it happens to be played at the first concert-Beethoven has been the done thing on at least two occasions in recent years. So no less a person than the music critic of The Times praised the imaginative enterprise of the pro-moters-‘"as wise as it was welcome"’when this year, for the first time, they devoted the entire programme to the work of one living composer. It was a British composer at that, for they asked Sir William Walton to conduct the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a programme of his own works. Those chosen were his first symphony, the Cello Con-certo-with Pierre Fournier-and the Partita for Orchestra. The Concerto and the Partita have been chosen also by the NZBS to begin-from YC stations on October 20-a series of BBC programmes recorded at the festival. Incidentally, it was announced the day after the Walton concert that Sir William’s second symphony will be played for the first time at next year’s festival.

Within a few days of this ceremonial opening the "lurid" musical episode of the festival occurred, when the Scottish National Orchestra under its new conductor, Alexander Gibson, presented a new Sinfonia for Two Orchestras by Iain Hamilton. This work, which had been commissioned jointly by the festival authorities and the Burns Federation, will be the second outstanding programme (Sunday, October 25, 8.45 p.m.) of the first week’s festival broadcasts from YC stations. If New Zealanders react to it as The Times critic did they won’t all be satisfied, but neither will they be indifferent. "Tt is a sinfonia but not a symphony," he wrote. "It is a set of 11 variations which are not variations. It is laid out for two orchestras which do not play in antiphony-so why? It does all sorts of things explained in the programme note which the ear cannot take in. It is eruptive with cat-call motifs; it is a jigsaw of textures and sonorities; it communicates nothing except the composer’s interest in technique. It asks, like so

many of this school’s recent essays, a fundamental aesthetic question: Is music a construction (like fretwork) or a communication (like language)?" This sinfonia, he added (determined that his point wouldn’t be missed), certainly frets and does not communicate, in spite of "an astonishingly persuasive per-

formance" by Mr Gibson, who got all its nuances just so. It is, he might have added but didn’t, the sort of composition the old school write letters to the editor about. Completing the first week’s festival programmes from YC stations (Thursday, October 22, 8.0 p.m.) will be a recital by the tenor Richard Lewis (with Gerald Motre accompanying) of songs by Purcell, Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, George Butterworth, Faure and Michael Tippett. The second week of Edinburgh Festival programmes will include the Walton symphony and a programme by the Edinburgh University Singers-Five Studies for Chorus and Piano by Anthony Hopkins is among the items. In succeeding weeks listeners will hear two further programmes by the Royal Philharmonic, who will play works by Beethoven, Bartok and Richard Strauss. Richard Lewis will be heard (with Josephine Veasey) in Janacek’s Diary of a Man Who Disappeared. and Nicarnor Zabaleta in a harp recital. The Prometheus Ensemble, the Lucerne Festival Strings, the Sextet Luca Marenzio and the soprano Irmgard Seefried will each be heard in two programmes; and the series will end with a performance of Wozzeck by the Royal Opera, Stockholm.