Stereo At Blackpool

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29800, 17 April 1962, Page 21

Stereo At Blackpool

(Bv

ARTHUR JACOBS]

(Reprinted by arrangement from the "Financial Time»“)

Taken to the Festival Hall for her first orchestral concert, an 18-year-old girl commented: “Marvellous 1 Almost like stereo!” The truth of this anecdote was vouched for by a visitor to an annual event specially concerned with the implications of the remark—the March Festival of Live and Recorded Music, held last month in one of Blackpool’s largest hotels. “March” refers not only to the calendar. Mr Ivan March, who directs the festival, runs Britain’s largest commercial record-lending library, with headquarters in Blackpool and branches in London, Manchester and Bradford. (Another is to open shortly in Bristol.) He also writes as a record critic. Moreover, as a former hornplayer with the Carl Rosa Opera, Mr March took up his instrument again to join in two of the festival’s “live” performances—a stage production of “Carmen” (with professional orchestra accompanying the high-grade amateur Worsley Art and Music Society) and a concert by the orchestra of the Royal Manchester College of Music. Valuable Gathering

The attendance of some 450 visitors for the full 1962 festival, plus more than 200 day-visitors, testifies to the success of the enterprise over the last four years. Apart from the much more modest conference of the National Federation of Gramo-

phone Societies the Blackpool Festival is the sole and extremely valuable, get-to-gether of record critics, technical experts, leading figures of the gramophone companies, retailers and individual consumers and borrowers of records.

EMJ. (controlling HM.V. and Columbia Records, etc.) brought Gerald Moore to give one of his celebrrted lecturerecitals on the art of the accompanist, in which he used records for the first time as well as the piano. Decca flew up a sample taken from a recording of Handel’s "Alcina” currently being made in London, in which Joan Sutherland sings and her husband, Richard Bonynge, conducts. Fidelity Shewn

Decca also produced a superbly clever demonstration of the fidelity of today’s recorded sound. A cellist and pianist on stage, playing Beethoven’s Variation on a duet from “The Magic Flute,” alternated with a tape-recorded version of themselves —the 27 changes between “live” sound and tape only being detectable when, for instance, a player got up to light a cigarette or chew a stick of rock as the tape took over his part. Stereo is an essential part of such fidelity of recordings and Mr March's own view is that stereo has beneficially altered the actual goal of reproduction. In the immediate pre-stereo years, he believes, sound engineers tried to bring instruments “into the

living-room,” sometimes with an exaggerated impact of sound; but stereo recording aims to “cut off' the endwall of the living-room and to suppose that a concert platform lies just beyond it. Lectures, discussions, demonstrations and live performances (with Alec Robertson and Leon Goossens among those participating) were sometimes held concurrently. But not even Mr March can please everyone. “Why no modern, no ultramodern, music?” complained a 70-year-old retired nurse from Croydon to me (she must have missed the demonstration of electronic music given by the Dutch composer Henk Badings), “Where is William Walton, where is Racine Flicker? We don’t like them, of course, but we ought to be educated."

The technically-minded examined new developments, notably in pick-up arms and heads and heard of a revolutionary principle of loudspeaker construction (the socalled “orthophase”) which has now reached practical operation in France. Music-lovers heard the still, small voice of the clavichord as well as samples of some Beecham recordings yet to be issued. Mere sound gimmickry was at a discount and the derisive term “ping-ponging” was heard in a reference to the more obvious exploitation of stereo. This was a festival for music lovers who make intelligent use of records.