ARTS AND ENTRTAINMENT Radio: The Baroque Boom

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30802, 14 July 1965, Page 7

ARTS AND ENTRTAINMENT Radio: The Baroque Boom

This week Brian Salkeld's “New Records” programme from 3YC on Saturday evening will be devoted entirely to new discs of baroque music. A good deal of baroque music is heard these days on other programmes. The increased availabiility of baroque recordings stems from a cultural boom in this field in Europe and the United States.

What is baroque? To many people the term means rococo, that highly decorative, vapid and pretentious manner of art which has been characterised •by scrollwork and cornucopias in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century sculpture and architecture. The term came into use in connexion with music this century. It is used to cate-

gorise music of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, although it describes more a style than a period. It suggests the bursting out of emotion from the formal elements of art that had previously contained it. This emotion, however, is presented within a rigid framework.

The baroque revival started as a counter to the excesses of romanticism towards the end of the nineteenth century. Interest in the stringent forms of Bach spread to other composers of the period, so now baroque is regarded as extending from Monteverdi and Gabrielli to Bach and Handel. At first romantic standards of interpretations prevailed, but in recent years a different outlook has taken over Old scores have been purged of the markings of wellmeaning romantic performers, others have been dug out of museums and libraries and dusted, old instruments—harpsichords, recorders and violas de gamba—have been duplicated by craftsmen so that their sounds can be heard again, and performers have strived for stylistic accuracy.

Europe has been the centre of the recording boom which began about 1949 with the introduction of the longplay record, and the use of tape which cut recording-session costs by allowing the correc-

tion of mistakes. Expansion has come with the glutting of classics recordings. As most baroque performances are small in scale stereo has not greatly stepped up costs. The main European recording companies, both large. and small maintain research staffs and go to grdat academic lenghts to prepare the music for recording. Most baroque music was very much do-it-yourself. Composers wrote a skeleton without indicating dynamics, tempos and phrasing and left the musicans to expand and embellish it. Ornamentation would be added to the melodic lie and the bass line had numbers indicating the chords to be played. Telejunken rims a school

in Munich where musicians can learn to play such instruments as rebecs, krummhorns, zinks and pommers. Contemporaries The 8.8. C. has the largest library of recorded voices in the world and the collection includes many non-commercial recordings of historic interest. From time to time the 8.8. C. invites a famous person to introduce a programme in which friends and contemporaries speak, and the guest is given the run of the archives. Ivor Brown, drama critic, novelist and essayist will be heard from 3YC on Sunday evening introducing recordings by James Bridie, Desmond McCarthy, Sir Laurence Olivier, Dame Edith Evans and J. B. Priestley.

On Monday a 8.8. C. concert of contemporary music will be repeated from 3YC. This includes a serial work by Nono, “Composizione 1,” Stravinsky’s memorial work dedicated to Dylan Thomas, Olivier Messiaen’s “Oiseaux Exotiques,” and Elizabeth Lutyen's serial “Music for Orchestra.” British Music

The Friday series devoted to significant works by British composers this week includes “Hammersmith” by Gustav Holst, a work first written for military band and later rewritten for orchestra, and the Prelude, “Forgotten Rite,” by John Ireland, a work written in 1913 which evokes pagan times.