The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1054, 6 November 1959, Page 17

The Week's Music...

by

GRAHAM

PATON

NTERNATIONAL music festivals do not always promote joy; sometimes, as in the case of the 1959 Prague Spring Festival from which we heard a recording (2YC, October 19), they may even bring about distress. What was so joydampening on this occasion was a work by Prokofiev-the fifth piano concerto. The impression it left. was distinctly dismal. Many of us, from such works as the Classical Symphony, the third piano concerto, the D major violin concerto, have observed the delightful scope of Prokofiev’s talents: the sharp intelligence behind the concise manner, the wit that can bite like acid, his gay inventiveness, and that especial precision with which he applies hard, bright colours to the orchestra-a musical personality, you might think, just a bit like Gogol’s in its flair for satiric observation and spiritedness, yet not without heart, Thus it is puzzling to try and account for the descent of such a composer into the banalities of the fifth concerto. What was once wit has weakened to an almost crass humour (the march-rhythm of the second movement), harmony is stale, much of the soloist’s part sounds like fast and empty-headed prattle, and the

general feeling of the concerto is one of enervation. Despite Prokofiev’s assurance when he began the work that he "had melodies enough for three concertos" it would be hard to single out any one of those used as either memorable or useful. It is also astonishing that the usual "finger-prints" of the composer’s style are reduced to such a shadowy imprint. ‘The question comes: how is a decidedly formed musical character with its own specific qualities able to relax into a performance which implies so little of its own intrinsic nature? Of course the creative impulse can not be turned on like a sluice, Obviously a composer must have misgivings about some of his brain-children, But in all of them the parentage at least should be unmistakable. With Prokofiev’s fifth concerto the disturbing thing is that the artist has passed a work which, as far as one can see, is outside the line of his development, which pays scant heed to the values implicit in his body of work, and which, in the context of his career, appears as the most inexplicable aberration. Talent enfeebled to the point where confusion of identity sets in: a slight case of Hyde to Dr Jekyll.