The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 16

The Week's Music...

by

GRAHAM

PATON

[tT was unfortunate-if unavoidablethat the week’s most important musical event could be heard only from 1YC. This was the concert by the Auckland Junior Symphony Orchestra under Charles Nalden. It was an event to make not only the hearts of players’ Mums beat faster; the rest of us had a dizzy vision of things to come-the time when, as Dr Krips foretells, people elsewhere will know about us as much for our music as for our prime mutton and cheese. From the members of this or-chestra-many in, others barely out of, their teens-we met up with that lubricant which best makes the musical world go round. It is simply this: a sense of wonder; and it is a fragile quality more often found in the work of youth orchestras than in the routinestaled. repetitions of the professionals. It takes the Krips of the world to dazzle the old hands with the reflection of the bonfires blazing on Mount Olympus. The young can see them for themselves. But the Auckland Junior Symphony is exciting for another reason than that it makes music’ with character and spirit. It also got through the scoresHaydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams-without being overly foxed by the notes. Dr Nalden’s policy of mak-

ing haste slowly--one programme a year -allows his section tutors to thrash out those technical problems which make life hard for the young amateur. When the public concert comes along enthusiasm is balanced by a surprising degree of technical competence. In fact, so much so that the orchestra has a good claim to be considered as Auckland’s leading musical activity. The expressive detail of first violin phrasing in the adagio of Haydn’s Symphony No. 97; the beauty of tone from oboe and cor anglais in the Larghetto from V.W.’s Fifth Symphony; the hushed tutti which ended the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth concerto-all were achievements which would have earned professionals praise. And even if you had heard everyone from Serkin and Gieseking to Dame Myra lay claim to Beethoven’s Fourth concerto you would still have been fascinated (and* moved) by the absolute belief which these young folk-the soloist, Barry Margan, who sailed through the work with storming temperament and a promising sense of poetry, is a mere 18-brought to the music; the reprise of the first movement was disturbing in both delicacy and intensity. It was a lesson to us all in true cantabile playing.