HOLBROOKE CONCERT

Press, Volume C, Issue 29563, 12 July 1961, Page 17

HOLBROOKE CONCERT

Trio, Sextet Performed

In the early part of this century young Joseph Holbrooke fought a long battle for contemporary music at a time when the word “con-

temporary” still possessed temporal rather than fashionable sign i licence. As conductor, pianist and composer he promoted concerts of his own and other men's compositions. It is fitting that some measure of historical justice, is being dispensed in the series of recitals devoted to thia composer which began at the University of Canterbury yesterday. With Jennifer Swartz, pianist, a talented group of piayers from the National Orchestra presented the Trio, in D for horn, violin and

piano, and the 'Biird Sextet. Opus 33, for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano. From its dramatic opening .the first movement of the trio emerged as an invigorating allegro which made much of the tonal

dichotomy existing between the two solo instruments.

Holbrook’s music expresses its forceful ideas in an idiom which has more of the strength of romantic utterance than one might expect and certainly deploys the instrumental combination as well as Brahms does in a similar essay. The slow movement is based initially on a contabile solo for horn and extended into a rhapsodic violin version of this theme which, for all its textural hiatuses in this performance, lent it moving individuality. The finale is a mixture of humour and lyricism. Obscurities of pitch and rhyihm and a constant dynamic forte made it difficult to comprehend and impassible to assess. The Sextet proved a work in which full-blooded sonorities dominated the colour aspect of the music which, structurally and melodically, was on simpler lines. Much of the scoring gave the wind instruments a Brahmsian sound, a* did the piano accompaniment The solemnity of the first movement and the air of nostalgia in the delicate andante which followed, gave the work the unusual character of melancholy; unusual. that is, for this medium. The finale is as far removed from such distinction as it is possible to imagine. The opening bars have a scherzo-like innocuousness which relieves the gloom, but their banality is insufficient recompense for the loss of subrtance. —JAR, *