Choir’s Mixed Reviews

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31364, 9 May 1967, Page 3

Choir’s Mixed Reviews

(Special Crspdt. N.Z.P.A.) SYDNEY, May 8.

Scores of disappointed people were turned away from the Sydney Town Hall on Saturday night, after queueing to get in to the Christchurch Harmonic Society’s fourth Sydney concert. The concert, part of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s subscription series, was virtually a sell-out, but a handful of returned tickets were put on sale at the door.

They were soon snapped up, and many people who had queued for an hour or more were unable to see the choir perform the Australian premiere of Schoenberg’s “Survivor From Warsaw” and Brahms’s “Requiem.” Schoenberg’s work, written in 1947, describes an incident in a Nazi pogrom as told to the composer by eye-wit-nesses. The work was described by Sydney newspaper critics today as “a brief musi-

cal cry of horror, raw and sharp” and as “a white hot outburst of emotion.” The Christchurch choir’s male chorus, which sang in the work, was coached in Hebrew by the Rev. J. Wolman, of Christchurch, before leaving home. Under the headline “Choir in Savagely Dramatic Narrative” Martin Long described the evening as “a fine concert” in today’s “Daily Telegraph.” He said the work was one of the most successful experiments in the difficult speech-to-music medium.

Long said Dean Dixon, conductor of the. Sydney Symphony Orchestra, gave Brahms’s “Requiem” an appropriately dignified and expansive interpretation. "He had splendid co-opera-tion from the New Zealand choir, whose members obviously knew the work intimately and sang it with discipline warmed by sincerity.” Roger Covell in the “Sydney Morning Herald” wrote of “some fervent orchestral playing, truly sympathetic and exalted conducting by Dean Dixon, and the admirable

qualities of the visiting Christchurch choir.” He added: “The Christchurch choir was a little less impressive than expected in the fugal tussles of the ‘Requiem.’ The sopranos became even a little shapeless at times in accentuation and definition of line; and the tenors had less than ideal tonal body when heard by themselves.

“But there were plenty of noble sounds from the singers as a whole and some ur-gently-stressed and eloquent baritone solos from Ronal Jackson.”

Brahms’s “Requiem” “exposed cruelly the numerical and tonal weakness of the male section of the choir,” Julian Russell wrote in the “Sun” tonight. Russell’s remarks amounted to the first hard criticism the choir has received in its four concerts in Sydney. Writing under the headline "Brahms Cruel to Choir,” Russell added: “But since the situation was irremediable the conductor, Dean Dixon, ignored it in search for a broad, warm reading of the work.”