THE MUSICAL WORLD

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 274, 15 August 1936, Page 25

THE MUSICAL WORLD

By

C.J.M.

Stray Notes. Mrs. Boardman (Miss Myra Sawyer), leaves for Sydney next week under contract with the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Mr. George Ellwood, who is well-re-membered here from his association with tlie Ava Symons-Short-Ellwood trio —has joined up with Mr. Albert Cazabou and Mr. Alexander Sverjensky in a trio combination in Sydney. The trio will make its first appearance during Sydney’s Music Week, which begins on September 25 next. Mr. Sydney de Vries, who is one of the principals in the Royal Wellington Choral Union’s performance of “Elijah,” under Dr. Malcolm Sargent at the Town Hall this evening, came to Australia as a principal in Sir B.enjiinan Fuller’s opera company on a 12 weeks contract. The Broadcasting Commission then gave him a series of engagements, with the result that he has been singing throughout Australia for 19 months. During that period he has given 103 broadcast recitals and seven public concerts, has sung in 38 broadcast opera performances, and 28 presentations of opera on the stage, and ha.s appeared once in oratorio. Soviet Music in Sydney.

Tlie New South Wales State Orchestra, under Professor Bernard Heinze, recently introduced to Sydney audiences “The Iron Foundry,” by Mossolov. This manifestation of the preseut-day outlook of Soviet Russia requires some of the performers to rattle sheet-iron and nails in order to depict “the rhythmic pulse of the foundry in sound.’ Tympani of all sorts are lavishly used ; and violins and piccolos devote themselves to representing the squeaky and high-pitched noises proper to the industrial treatment of iron. A.note printed in the score requires the horn section to stand up while playing. “The bells of these instruments as they turn to face the audience,” said Professor Heinze in an interview, “are supposed to suggest the Soviet worker in his heroic moments. The ‘Steel Foundry’ is music calculated to stimulate the modern nervous system. It ha.s real music interest, and is not merely sensational.”

A Famous Pianist. The news that Vladimir Horowitz is to visit Australia next May, under the auspices of the Broadcasting Commission, will be received with enthusiasm by all who are in touch with musical events abroad (states a Sydney correspondent). Although still only 32 years of age, Horowitz has established himself as one of the most exciting among living pianists. .Some people refer to him, in fact, as the greatest of all; but such comparisons between eminent interpreters are always both misleading and unfair. Artur Schnabel, for example, cannot achieve what Horowitz does in galvanising works like the Liszt. Sonata into many-coloured flume. But Horowitz, on the other hand, could not be measured against Schnabel in the pure, intellectual and finely poised quality which the latter brings to the

presentation of the Beethoven sonatas. Accordingly to musicians who have followed his career, Horowitz’s transcendental technical accomplishment must be heard to be believed. Music in Schools. At a meeting in Sydney recently of the Music Week organisation, Mr. J. G. McKenzie (chairman of tlie schools’ broadcast committee), who represented the Director of Education, surveyed the position of music in the State schools. All girls’ high schools, he said, had regular classes in musical appreciation, though only a minority of the girls studied theory. Appreciation was now being made a feature of the curriculum in boys’ high schools. Yet there remained much to be done.’ Music ranked as only half a subject in the secondary school examinations ; whereas its true value was twice that of some of the other subjects. Even then, it was difficult to get boys and girls to take music, owing to the ignorance and antagonism of parents. He referred to the good work the Commission was doing with its orchestral matinees, which were always crowded, and with its broadcasts to schools. He urged the Music Week committee to keep on agitating for a chair of music at the university. The establishment of such a chair would greatly raise the prestige of music and musicians in the eyes of the general public. Broadcasting and the Public.

“What is tl.e situation in music today, as compared with that of a decade back?” asks Sir Walford Davies, and he answers his own question thus: ‘‘Though it must be admitted that there is prevalent at the moment much depressing broadcast evidence of a debased taste for senseless music sensationally rendered, there is also a strikingly healthy and rising tide of musical understanding and taste for the art itself, as apart from its associated uses.

“You may safely picture millions listening nightly; among these, tens of thousands are doubtless listening with ever-increasing critical discernment; and among these again, hundreds of young listeners of outstanding musical sensitivity are listening creatively (including, maybe, a genius or two), feasting on the good things, but mentally vowing never, when their chance comes, to afflict the world with the banalities that are still so frequently heard. Public taste must needs go up and up, as well as down and down to the nether regions of deadly unthinking iteration. And if I may here be pardoned a violent analogy, even decay makes for good fertilising. “I expect, as listeners, we roughly differentiate the various nationalities in music by general impression rather than by any details of melodic or harmonic pattern; by uses of mass and colour and by rhythmic . behaviour rather than by the bend or turn of the composer’s melodic lines or chords. In this general way I have been surprised to hear a person, self-styled as being musically ignorant, exclaim while listening-in, ‘That’s Debussy, isn’t it?’ when not only was the guess correct, but when the composer was being (as I imagined) very faithfully French in his elusive orchestral, ways.”