LUKEWARM RECEPTION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21758, 24 March 1934, Page 10 (Supplement)

LUKEWARM RECEPTION

BRITISH COMPOSERS' WORKS SERIES OF LONDGN CONCERTS The 8.8.C. orchestral concerts of British music were the principal musical events of the New Year in London. Writing when three of ths sis concerts had been given, an English correspondent says: No public enthusiasm is conspicuously apparent so far. Audiences have been thin, some of the music has obviously been borne with rather than gladly heard, and the comments of our group of critics have varied only from oautious to less cautious, save when the theory that there is some virtue in a composer's music which duller ears cannot discern is exploited for all it is worth on behalf of some favoured writer thereof.

One Australian composer has been represented on these British music programmes Mr. Arthur Benjamin, whose new violin concerto thus had had a first performance. It made a good impression. It is skilfully written, in the modern idiom, and as an example of music of its time and style holds ita own among the many works of the day, with more claim than most of them possesses for place in the repertoire. Other works whose qualities have stood out are Vaughan William's Floa Cainpi and Arnold Bax's Fourth Symphony. Few of us are at all sure of what Vaughan Williams precisely means by this music, and especially by the music of the chorus which alternately hums and murmurs words from the Song of Solomon, but there is attractiveness, if of a somewhat exotic kind, in the efFects produced. In his Fourth Symphony Bax has descended from the heights and emerged from the depths which either exalt the music of bo much cf his earlier tymphonic works to the realms of thought unknown to most of his hearers, or submerge it within layers of a darkness even darker than the Celtic twilight which is so often its misty wrapping, and has written a symphony of direct appeal, only the slow movement of which suggests this composer's characteristic soarings within a world of his own.

As the public's reluctance to acclaim British music, or even to go to hear it (with the few exceptions that salve our amour propre), is obvious, apologists naturally come forward now and again who present what seems to them good

reasons therefor. For example, Dr. Vaughan Williams, thinking, doubtless, of the fact that British music not only is poorly supported in its own country, though often heard, but is not even heard abroad, has recently suggested that perhaps the British composer " has something to say to his own countrymen that no one of any other age or any other country can say and further, " he may produce a kind of art which other nations cannot appreciate, and which will not be reducible to their standards." This does not, however, take us far toward an explanation of why the British publio is so coy in the matter of British composers' music. Nor does Dr. Dyson's reflection —another recent British opinion on the point—help very greatly, for he puts forward the optimistic implication that many of the composers of the great music of the past wrote it "in a provincial way, for their own locality and their own contemporaries," as to which it can only be said that it is very greatly to be wished that the British music of today, which so patently is British, and written for its own locality and its own contemporaries, had in it some of that fire of undying life which is born of inspiration and inventive genius, and so has immortalised the old music of the masters across the centuries. Much of the trouble with British music is the simple trouble that its composition is largely in the hands of academically cultured musicians, and that few, if any, of them are more than that. And the further fact that neither Elgar nor Deliua, by a great deal our outstanding composers, is an academically trained composer, hut is a composer of original genius, seems to point unerringly to the root of the matter.