MUSIC

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23001, 2 October 1936, Page 3

MUSIC

NOTES AND RECORDS

By Allegro

The latest issue of Music in New Zealand contains an appreciation of Eileen Joyce’s playing by L. D. Austin, and an article “ Music at the North Pole,” also by this writer. T. V. Griffiths writes of Liszt and later discusses present-day methods of presenting the difficulties of music to children in “ Music Without Tears.” Further information about the new Vaughan Williams opera “ The Poisoned Kiss ” is given. Richard Crooks, who is well known to us through his gramophone recordings, will give his concert in the Town Hall on Monday evening. He has an extensive repertoire, including attractive • songs from grand opera, opera and popular ballads. The Sydney Mail, commenting on the opening of his second Sydney season, says Mr Crooks met with extraordinary success. His superb phrasing, emotional restraint, impeccable enunciation, marvellous legato and breath control and genial personality exert an irresistible appeal to the audience, which showed its appreciation with tremendous enthusiasm. The great tenor’s singing of “ Vainement ma bien-aimee,” from Lalo’s “ King of Ys,” particularly stood out as an interpretative gem of matchless quality Alfred Einstein, writing with reference to the 201st anniversary, on September 5, of the birth of Johann Christian Bach—the “ English ” or “ London ” Bach —sketches interestingly the life of the composer, who was the only member of the great Bach family to strike out a line all his own. His first instruction in harpsichord playing and composition was given him by his father. Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750, and the 15-year-old boy was then taken to Berlin by his half-brother, who “ brought up and informed him,” as he records in the famous genealogy of the Bach dynasty. But when he was 20 Johann Christian did something unprecedented among the Bachs—he went to Italy. There, as master of the music in the household of Count Agostino Litta at Milan and pupil of Padre Martini of Bologna, who was the musical oracle of the age, he wrote church music and studied Palestrina. At 25 he was apopinted organist of Milan Cathedral. But his ecclesiastical career did not go far. A year later he was writing his first opera for Turin and Naples, and in the summer of 1762 made off to London, where he Became music teacher to the music-loving Queen, who a year before had still been Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. In 1764, with his friend, the gambist and composer, Carl Friedrich Abel, he launched at the Hanover square rooms the famous Back-Abel concerts, which were to play an historic part in London musical life. It was a carefree life that Bach lived, with such friends as Abel and Gainsborough (who painted his portrait in 1776) and with the singers of the Italian Opera. On January 1, 1782, he died. When his contemporaries in Italy, France and England speak of the “ great ” or “ celebrated” Bach they mean not Wilhelm Friedema'nn or Carl Philipp Emanuel, and still less Johann Sebastian (whom they knew not), but Johann Christian Bach.. Friedemann was (Alfred Einstein says) a very talented musician, but he never quite succeeded in overcoming the division between the “ elegant ’ and the “ learned ” styles, a division that was his heritage as his father’s son. Philipp Emanuel found refuge in his sensibility, which rendered his music extraordinarily stimulating and suggestive to fellow-composers. Johann Christian, simply through thoroughly Italianising himself, became a universal musician. He possessed nothing like Gluck's greatness and austerity, and obviously he never had the least impulse to question the traditional forms of opera. He was no reformer. But his feeling for sensuous, musical beauty was a hundred times greater than Gluck’s. He wrote 11 operas, which, as wholes, are dead, bqt they contain certain arias the hovel charm and tender melody of which were the enchantment of the age from Naples to Copenhagen, from London to St. Petersburg. He wrote harpsichord (or piaonforte) sonatas and chamber music with harpsichord which combine a kind of social grace with a personal tinge. One or two of his sonatas were arranged as concertos by Mozart, who was fond of playing them down to his later years, and provided them with cadenzas. A scheme has been completed for the formation of a Palestine Symphony Orchestra of Jewish players who have been thrown out of work by political persecution. The opening festival performance has been fixed for December 26 at Tel-Aviv. From Tel-Aviv the orchestra will go on to Jerusalem and Haifa, returning to Tel-Aviv in order to repeat the opening concert for the benefit of the workers’ organisations. These concerts will be conducted by Toscanini, who will then take the orchestra to Egypt, giving two concerts in Cairo and two in Alexandria, starting on January 9. In order to derive full benefit from Toscanini’s conducting there will be no soloists until the return of the orchestra to Palestine in February, when the permanent conductors will take over. Steinberg will conduct in February, Dobrowin in March, and then Steinberg again to the end of the season in May. Altogether there will be 12 concerts in TelAviv, 10 in Jerusalem, and eight in Haifa. The Tel-Aviv concerts will be repeated for the workers’ organisations who, when capital was required for the rebuilding of the concert hall, gave practically half the necessary sum in thq form of free labour and material. The scheme has found generous supporters abroad, and it is hoped that in two years’ time it will be possible for the orchestra to pay a visit to England and America. In four years’ time the orchestra should be entirely self-supporting. Since the scheme was started applications have been received from so many first-desk men from the German orchestras that Palestine, it is claimed, voung and small as it is, will yet have one of the grandest orchestras in the world.