WORLD OF MUSIC

Southland Times, Issue 18972, 20 June 1923, Page 10

WORLD OF MUSIC

At Home and Abroad

(By

“Presto.”)

Last week when the Christchurch Musical Society presented “Lucia de Lammermoor,” one newspaper critic complained that Madame Gower-Burns, who sang Lucia, used an edition of the opera different from that which her companions sang. This prompted the soprano to insert an advertisement in the newspapers declaring that she and Mr Clarkson, the Enrico, used the same edition. They are touchy in Christchurch! Commenting on the performance the Christchurch Press said of Mr Clarkson: As “Enrico,” Mr Charles Clarkson made a very prominent figure, singing excellently indeed and with more perfect enunciation of his vowels than formerly. But in the aria “To My Ruin,” his singing resembled a series of explosions that made one fear for his safety and—the truth must be told—in the sextet, the most beautiful perhaps of all Donizetti’s inspirations, his voice completely domineered over his associates, not to the advantage of the movement by any means.

Madame Gower-Burns, whose career on the concert platform is prodigious in length, is spoken of thus: The title part of “Lucia,” that has made the name of not a few of the great singers and has been the undoing of many more, was entrusted to Madame GowerBurns. As far as skill, mastery and style are concerned, she can still hold her own, but the voice seemed less able than formerly of bearing the heavy strain involved in the exacting part.

The first performance of “La Khovanchtchina,” the musical drama in four acts and five tableaux of Mussorgsky, orchestrated and completed by Rimsky-Korsakov, was given at the Paris Opera on April 13. The performance was directed by Koussevitzky, and the cast included Lyse Charney, Jean Laval and Jean Clos, Journet, Huber ty, Duclos, Goffin and Fabert.

Gustave Hoist’s opera, “The Perfect Fool,” which has been in rehearsal for some time by the British National Opera Company, was expected to be produced at the season in Glasgow in the latter half of March.

An opera by Lord Berners to a libretto based on Merimee’s "Carrosse du SaintSacrament,” has been announced for production at Monte Carlo by M. Diaghiley. He told Jean-Aubrey, who reported it in The Christian Science Monitor, that he had written no overture or prelude, the utility of which he fails to see; but there is nothing new in that. He has not given successive aires and scenes, but follows Merimee’s comedy line by line. And there is nothing new in that. One critic says of it: “The orchestration is light. Vocally the work is easy and free from strain. It is full of verse, refinement and tact, the Spanish colour charming and delicate, reflecting colonial Spain of the eighteenth century.”

At the last of the Reid Orchestral Concerts in Edinburgh there was the first performance of Granville Bantock’s “Three Songs from the Greek Anthology” for voice and flute, a scene from the third act of Professor Donald F. Torey’s opera, “The Bride of Dionysos” and Elgar’s ’cello concerto. Bantock’s songs are treated “in the spirit of the Greek modes” and the voice, unsupported by an accompaniment, alternates with the flute. They are, according to the Scotsman, very unusual in form, but “full of a strange, beauty.”

Mme. Blanche Marchesi, daughter of a more celebrated mother, Mathilde Marchesi, who taught some of the great prima donnas of recent years and of a baritone who sang in the first English performance of “Faust” in 1863, has just published a book of her reminiscences, called “A Singer’s Pilgrimage.” She was born in 1864, and from babyhood lived in the singing studio. As a child she learned the violin from Nikisch. Her girlhood was spent in France and she considers herself French; but her success in London in 1896 decided her to adopt London as her home, and she sang and taught there for a quarter of a century.

Speaking of Vaughan Willams’s new Mass, Ernest Newman says the only choral gem with a future is the one with a past—the pure polyphonic style worked out by the sixteenth contrapuntists. Some of Vaughan Williams's progressions, it is true, would hardly be approved of by a classical contrapuntist, but his plentiful sequences of bare fifths amply justify themselves; I imagine their gauntness and austerity would be exceedingly impressive in a great cathedral. This short work is one of the best that Vaughan Williams has given us. As we all know by now, his mind is one of the sincerest of our time; he is incapable of penning a single bar for the mere sake of external effect. But the Mass is full of the kind of effect that grows naturally out of the subject—such masterly touches, for instance, as in the climax of the “Kyrie,” where, without any addition to the forces employed since the commencement, and with the voices still singing very softly, the effect of a great groundswell of tone is obtained simply by carrying the basses farther down than they have been before. But the whole Mass is finely conceived, and then worked out in masterly fashion, and it shows—a lesson which some of our orchestral composers might take to heart—that there is no need to be perpetually trying to forge a new instrument and invent a new method when an old one lies ready to hand that is still capable of an infinite variety of expression.

Sir Thomas Beecham made his London reappearance at the Albert Hall with a doubie orchestra. “Serious criticism of music in the Albert Hall,” says Ernest Newman, “is almost impossible, on account of the extraordinary accoustics of the place; so I need do nothing more than record the fact that he received an effectionate greeting from an enormous audience. Every one hopes that now he will be able to take up again his great work for English music, orchestral as ‘well as operatic.”

American critics have welcomed Mr Verbrugghen. Deems Taylor, writing in the New York World, praised his work with the Minneapolis Orchestra, and said that the performance of the Fifth Symphony made him understand why Verbrugghen was “a famous Beethoven conductor.” He remarks that “his attacks, in the fortes, are like pistol shots.” Mr Verbrugghen will conduct his new players with the son of the greatest of conductors, for the pianist Mitja Nikisch will appear with the Minneapolis Orchestra in December, during his first tour of the United States. After a recent fine performance of Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony Mr Verbrugghen was presented with a huge basket of flowers by a group of admiring musicians.

Mr James Messeas. ’cellist of the Verbrugghen quartet, will shortly join his leader in the United States.

It is possible that Madame Lydia Lipkovska, the brilliant Russiam prima donna, will visit the Dominion in the neart future, under the aegis of Messrs J. and N. Tait. Madame Lipkovska is at present in Sydney, where she is to open her Australian tour with a series of costume recitals. If Madame visits the Dominion it will make an unlooked for welcome and addition to the number of artists visiting New Zealand this year. There is, moreover, a probability that quite a number of other artists will be induced to include Australia and New Zealand in their itinerary of the East—a very popular tour in these days. Mischa Elman has been through the East, also Godowski, quite recently. Heifetz is going shortly, or is on the way, and Pavlova and her Russian ballet have lately completed this increasingly popular tour, finishing the adventure in this instance in Egypt Lydia Lipkovska

was born in Russia and trained in Petrograd, where she made her debut at the Imperial Opera as Gilda in “Rigoletto.” She has made her name in opera, not only in New York, Boston and Chicago, but at Covent Garden, when she was engaged by Mr H. V. Higgins in 1912. There she made her debut as Suzanne in Wolf-Ferrari’s “Segreto di Susanna.” Among her other roles she sang Violetta in “Traviata,” with John McCormack; also Gilda in “Rigoletto” and Mimi in “La Boheme.” Her roles include Manon and Tatliana in Tschaikowsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” and in addition to the opera houses already mentioned she has sung frequently at the Opera Comique (Paris), the Royal Opera, Berlin, and at La Scala, Milan. Madame’s recitals involve the use of Russian costumes of great picturesqueness and exceeding richness of colour, and costumes of Louis XIV.

It is reported from Paris that Carl Tunsch, a Berlin collector of notions, bought a famous Stradivarius, the “Titan” for something over a billion marks, or about £6OOO. This is stated to be the highest price ever paid for a violin. This violin dates from 1715, when Stradivarius was at the height of his fame. In the year 1870 it came into the possession of a Boston banker for £250, but later was acquired by the firm of Caressa in Paris, which has just sold it.

The masque was, of course, the revue of its day (says The Daily Telegraph). The Elizabethan stage manager had a free hand, and probably found the best substitutes the time could give him for our limelight effects, our Russian dancers, and impressionist scenery, Then, as much later, serious-minded persons thought it a silly business. Bacon is quite explicit on this point and in the days of Garrick, Cibber jeered at “Caliban, Sycorax, and one of the Devils Trilling in Trios.” And if “The Tempest” was treated in this way there is no need to apologise (as the programme did), for the action of Dr Arne and his managers. “Comus,” indeed, provides as many opportunities for the stage manager as were ever dreamed of by Mr Diaghileff. What a drop-curtain his scenepainters could make of the wild wood where theivish Night closed up her stars in her dark lantern for some felonius end, while

a thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men’s

names— And to think of the riots and ill-managed merriment of loose unlettered hinds is, for us moderns, to think of the uncouth, biting rhythms of “Le Sacre du Printemps.”

The question whether melody still exists in modern music is answered eagerly in the affirmative by Hugo R. Fleischmann in The Chesterian. It is “precisely in the works of our most radical innovators that melodies bordering on the miraculous in their fascinating beauty are found, unfolding their nostalgic blossoms.” To reach this stage some great transformations had to be undergone. Instead of the “gently graduated rising and sinking melodic line,” we now have “enormous leaps over two or three octaves,” such as are characteristic of Schonberg. Then, also, are sultry, blurred chromaticism has invaded the melodic contour and done its share in crumbling the old, vigorous diatonic system.” And, “the audacious Alvis Haba of Schreker’s school, has introduced quarter tones into his string quartet. This fact, we are informed, deals the death blow to traditional melody and is leading it into new paths, the enormous significance of which cannot yet be fully grasped.” The old diatonic system having been “crumbled” and traditional melody having received its death blow, the field is free. PLAYING FROM MEMORY. Teachers are pretty well agreed on the advantages of memory playing of solos at recitals, and they insist upon it as a rule, but in some instances it may be a handicap, says a writer in The London Morning Post. Musical memory, or rather the instinct of mechanical habit, may not co-exist with good executive ability, and otherwise capable players sometimes have their confidence shaken, and break down in public for want of the score before them. Conductors and members of the orchestra are not subjected to this rigour. It seems as if the analogy of the actor and his letter-perfect part were being pushed too far. The cases are not quite identical. But so strong has the fetish become that Pachmann actually apologised to his audience for keeping the score of one number before him while he played. Clara Schumann, long after she was a student, resented the rule, and used to confess that she cried over the necessity. The failure of memory is particularly painful to a pianist when engaged on a concerto. Not long since it was the writer’s lot to hear the greatest English lady pianist go wrong in the Mozart D minor concerto, which she must know backwards. In the modern concertos, which offer formidable difficulties to memorisation, a good many, or indeed most, pianists play with their music before them; in the last twelve months London audiences have seen Cortot, de Greef, Murdoch and others do so. It is rarer in solo performance, though by no means unusual. Miss Harriett Cohen gave thus a remarkably fine first performance of Arnold Bax’s recent piano sonata, and Maurice Ravel played some of his .own piano pieces in London without relying on his unaided memory.