HASTINGS ORCHESTRAL SOCIETY.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume VIII, Issue 219, 17 August 1918, Page 6

HASTINGS ORCHESTRAL SOCIETY.

A SUCCESSFUL CONCERT. IN AID OF CHRISTMAS PARCELS. There was a very large audience at the Hastings Municipal Theatre last night when the Hastings Orchestral Society gave their first concert of the 12th season. The programme wag an excellent one, and besides the orchestral numbers the Society were fortunate in securing the services of such a brilliant vocalist as Miss Teresa McEnroe, of Wellington. Miss McEnroe’s re-appearance was the signal for an outburst of applause. This gifted soprano was in fine voice and quite charmed and captivated her audience with the ease and grace with which she rendered each number, holding the listening ear from first to last of her solos. Very .enthusiastic was the audience, double and triple encores being requested. Miss Enroe’s solos were “Nymphs and Fairies,” “Songs My Mother Taught' Me,” At the Midhour of Night,” and ' “There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden,” besides several favourite encore numbers, all of which were rendered enchamtingly. At the ! conclusion of her final appearance, Miss McEnroe was the recipient ol j a> handsome bouquet from the Com-1 mittee of the Lady Liverpool Fund for the benefit of which the concert ■ was held. | The orchestral numbers were a treat, in fact the audience were taken quite by surprise, the beautiful music being most charming to Hie ear. The orchestra showed all round general excellence and efficie<ncy, and it would be hard to single out which was the best number. The music, too, suited the tastes of the audiences, which was evidenced by the enthusiastic applause at the conclusion of each item. Mr Percy Tombs, the Society’s able conductor, had- his players under perfect control, with the result that for a finish- | ed performance in all phrases _ of r playing, the orchestra certainly | achieved a splendid success. The concert opened with the overture, i “Fingal’s Cave,” (Mendelssohn). I The whole overture is full of the sights and sounds of the northern islands, with the sombre skies, moaning winds, and surging waves, and is wonderfully descriptive. The orchestra’s next number “The Surprise” (Hayden) was also a delighttul item. After the introduction the principal movement “Vivace Assai” enters and goes with a merry swing, the dramatic material being very easy to follow. A fortissimo chord at the end of a pianissimo phrase, which contains “the surprise” has a truly startling effect. Following this number was a menuetto which was also finely rendered, as was again Vivace Assai, the music eoing with great verve and spirit throughout. Che Grand Coronation March “Le Prophete (Meyerbeer) was another delightful piece and contains some of the composer’s grandest inspirations and brilliant colourings. The final number was the selection “The Earl and the Girl” (Caryll). This selection contains many popular numbers and known to most music lovers, and in this piece the orchestra quite distinguished themselves, being loudly applauded at the finisn. From every point of view the concert was undoubtedly the most successful and enjoyable the Society .ave yet put forward, one and all oeing thorougjhly pleased with the performance. REALISM. ITS PLACE IN MUSIC. The music lovers in Hastings who enjoyed Miss Teresa McEnroe’s delightful singing at the Orchestral concert at the Municipal Theatre last night will fully appreciate the following brief essay which appeared in the “London Times” last month.

In the last line of a certain song —“lt was only the voice of a bird’’ —a singer lately made on the final word three successive trills which do not appear in the printed copy ; and there were those who smiled, If they smiled at that, why do the? or should they not at the cuckoo whose actual call is heard in Beethoven’s “Scene at the brook,” or at the nightingale’s “evensong” in “Handel’s L’Allegro? And is ther« not something presumptuous in rejecting such a device when we knew from Lucretius that “the act of imitating the liquid notes of birds was far earlier than the art of linking smooth verse to song” ? There are, if we except Mozart, few composers who have not made room in their scheme for _ local colour. Palestrina sent the voice up for ascendit in ccelura and down for sepultus est. Purcell’s “For look bow high the heaven is in comparison -with the earth” combines both motions; and once, in his anxiety to be appropriate, he even misses the point, when he sets “They that go down to the sea in ships” to two descending octavesas if the words had been “go down at sea”! Handel makes the sun stand still upon Gibeon on a high A, and Brahms bases the stability of the faith on a low D. By Schutz the stone is “rolled away” from the sepulchre on a series of melodic curves. Both would go off into an orgy of chromatic intervals at a word like “sin” or “deceit.” or of involved figuration at “wander” 01 “confuse” ; that with this the question merges itself in the deeper one of the power of tones_ in general to express the sense of words, with which we are not now concerned. In these instances and thousands of others there is a progress from literal to allusive, from fact to idea. As long as the imitation of external sounds by music is confined to allusion and'steps short of statement it does not break the flow of the thought. When Magner’s heroes enter to fanfares, when his dragon moves lumberingly on low muttered notes, or his flames leap to bright points fanned by the wind of intermittent crescendos, we feel that there has been no imitation, only suggestion. But the guillotine in tne Symphonic Fantastique. like the executioner in Salome, pulls up short with gruesomely realistic sounds. It is as if our beat sudds nly grounded on at shallow. The bleating of sheep that breaks in upon Don Quixote s dreams of chivalry is as incongruous as a cat marching down the aisle tad tn air during the Psalms. And it is meant to be so. because, overdo!; and unmusical as tl.c bleating is. the incongruity of a bemused hero and a misunderstand.ng wor.d is the v>*rj thing to be expressed. Again, th brass band in* “Cockaigne.” ijm kitchen implements in Vaughan Williams’s “Wasps," and the mouth organ in bis symph ny are the very stuff out of which the music is !•■ be made.

THE ANALOGY OF POETRY.

Poetry has an interesting analogue to this imitation of external sounds in music. The “music” of verse is too subtle a thing to imprison in a definition, but it includes such suggestions as the fretful f s followed by the smooth liquids in “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well,” and the noilow vowels of “Toad, that under cold stone . . . ” A subtle use of this device makes it sometimes state facts, sometimes hint at feelings. Thus, in “First Murderer. — Safe in a ditch he bides with twenty trenched gashes on his head” we hear the reiterated and monotonous blows in the alliteration and assonance of “twenty trenched” ; and in. “Macbeth.—Here lay Duncan, his silver skin laced with his golden blood,” the level antithesis with its balanced euphony contradicts the broken sense of the words, and by that contradiction, hints at the tur•nvoil in the speaker’s mind. The monotony there and the smoothness here are both external to the sense of the words, and are both woven :into it for a purpose; and this is much what music does when it calls in the monotonous hum of a spinning wheel to accentuate Margaret’s dull despair, or falsifies the Walhalla motive. to hint at what Wotan has forfeited by his huckstering spirit. I To return now to our original i questions. As to Lucretius, art is most itself when artists are most themselves; if, in the morning of the world, they were closer than we are to nature, they were right to domesticate the skylark’s unpremeditated lavs, though we cannot. Beethoven has led us so naturally out through the woods and streams that we hear the cuckoo as an integral part of the landscape. In Handel’s time singers sang like nightingales, and there was nothing startling in a soprano pretending to be one. Mr. Landon 1 Ronald might have but has not, written a bravura song ; so that when the last word was trilled there was a mu ileal pun which neither composer nor singer intended