MUSIC

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22373, 21 September 1934, Page 2

MUSIC

NOTES AND RECORDS By Allegro. The September issue of Music in New Zealand has various points of interest in its editorial section concerning the competition movement. Frederick Page gives useful suggestions concerning the music library, and will deal with books on later composers in another issue. The “ Leading New Zealand Musician ” in the journal this mouth is H, Temple White, the well-known Wellington organist. Mr Frederick Moore, the visiting examiner for the Associated Board of Iloyal Schools of Music, London, took several hundred people on a voyage of exploration on a recent evening at Brisbane. It is true that that voyage was announced as a lecture recital to be given in the Teachers’ Conference Hall under the auspices of the Musical Association of Queensland. It is also true that an all Chopin programme was promised. Mr Moore is the right-hand man of Tobias Matthay, who has enunciated certain principles for the attainment of facile pianoforte technique. Mr Moore showed to a remarkable degree how these principles help in producing beautiful piano tone. The evening gave up many delights in many different ways. The lecturer and the pianist (the Telegraph says) were almost separate entities. For Mr Moore has that typically English subtelty in a treatment of his subject matter. _ Finely pointed and barbed arrows of wit were used to give point to many words of great wisdom to the piano student. He spoke on all manner of topics, giving the audience, as he said, a fortnight’s refresher course in two hours. He spoke of the use of the pedal, pointing out that “ Bach had been dc-composing for about 33 years ” before this improvement was added to the instrument. He told tetoriea about the Chopin works that he played, and kept the audience in high good humour. That was one side of the evening's enjoyment. When Mr Moore sat at the piano and played his Chopin, another personality emerged. He had been working hard all day, and gravely confessed that all his music was left in far away Perth. So that if there were moments when something had to be conceded to sheer technical brilliance, the artist in Mr Moore rose triumphant despite these shortcomings. The most significant aspect of his playing was the musicianly insight that he brought to bear on every work that he played. He played many familiar works of the Polish master, works that we have heard time out of number in our concert halls. Yet in everyone of them he brought out some new and undiscovered facet, some little point of interpretation, which, somehow or other, every other pianist seemed to have missed. His tone was warm and rich. It sang in a clear, steady voice. But the most significant aspect of his playing undoubtedly was this almost kaleidoscopic clarity of his treatment of each work. One could see through each reading to each tiny insignificant section of it, and yet get an impression of a perfectly composed whole. His programme contained many things familiar, and one thing most unfamiliar, the B minor Sonata, Opus 58, a Chopin work which is publicly performed but rarely for some reason difficult to fathom. The work was invested with this same kaleidoscopic clarity in its treatment.

Writing of Beethoven’s “ Eroica ” symphony, Alfred Einstein says;—“When Beethoven gave his ‘ Eroica ’ to the world he expressed a strange wish. Or, rather, one that has come to seem strange to us. He wished that the work should be placed at the .beginning and not at the end of concert programmes. He considered his symphony to be too long, too difficult and exhausting for it to be able, at the end of an evening, to count on an alert, attentive, understanding .audience. I suppose that to-day there is nowhere a conductor who respects Beethoven’s wish, Xo doubt the presentday conductor would plead that the ‘ Eroica ’ long ago ceased to be a difficult work, and that in dimensions and pretensions it has been outdone by dozens of other symphonies. And he would no doubt be right; modern conductors are always right. There is no contradicting them. But an interesting point remains—why is it that modern conductors always put the ‘Eroica’ at the end of their programmes? The reason is that, in spite of its age of 130 years, the ‘ Eroica,’ though it may have been surpassed in dimensions and pretensions, has never been surpassed in effect. The conductor wants his audience to disperse with minds freshly stamped with the most powerful impression of the whole concert. And no matter how jaded and drooping the audience, it cannot help responding to the ‘Eroica’s ’ whip and spur.” A well-known musician in England, Mr Benno Hollander, who has been a Londoner by adoption for nearly 60 years, enters a protest against the pace employed by the modern musical mind in the treatment of the old classics. As a small boy he played the violin in the old Hanover Square Rooms. He knew Berlioz, and as a youth had the experience of playing Mendelssohn’s concerto with the encouraging spectacle before him of Vieuxtemps, Massart (his teacher at the conservatoire), and Sarasate, all in the front row of the stalls. He studied composition with Saint-Saeus, a life-long friend, and he led the violas at the famous series of Wagner concerts at the Albert Hall in 1877, which Wagner and Richter conducted.

Mr Hollander is rarely seen nowadays in the concert room, but he keeps in touch with music by means of the radio. His criticism of the renderings of the classics so obtained is vivacious. He regards modern conductors and violinists as infatuated by a mania for pace at any price. "When Beethoven wrote the finale of the Kreutzer Sonata,” he says, " the fastest form of travel was a galloping horse. To the modern mind a horse i» a slow-moving beast. Motor cars and aeroplanes represent speed now—and that would be all very well if attempts were not made to bring Beethoven into the race. Then the minuets of the classic symphonies are conducted by men who obviously have no notion of what the deliberate, dignified grace of a minuet was. Their minuets are rustic romps.” The pace of the finale of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto is a subject on which Mr Hollander expresses himself with mordancy against the radio violinists who set out to break the record in this movement.