MUSIC NOTES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1516, 15 May 1919, Page 32

MUSIC NOTES.

(By

“G” String.)

Amy Castles, the Victorian singer, who is returning from America, was not 20 years of age when she made her first appearance in concert work in Sydney. She sang Tosti’s “GoodBye.”

The widow of the great composer, Cesar Franck, died in Paris on December 1, at the age of 94. The French musician married in 1848, the year of the Revolution. Vincent d’lndy, on whom the mantle of

Cesar Franck has fallen, says that the wedding party, to reach the church, was obliged to climb a barricade, the bride and bridegroom being helped by the insurgents, who were massed behind the improvised fortification. She was a young actress, the daughter of a more celebrated

one, Madame Desmeusseaux, of the Comedie Francaise (1790-1857), excelling in “duennaj” parts. According to the “Tribune,” New York is the richer by the war of one great musical personality — Serghi Vassilievich Rachmaninoff. Last January he fled from Moscow, where the Bolsheviki, under the spell of Socialism gone mad, had begun the ruthless extermination of aristocrat and burgeoise, where soldiers and Reds were united in a campaign of wholesale murder. M. Rachmaninoff spent some time in Scandanavia.

Then, remembering America’s hospitality during his visit nine years ago, he brought his wife and two little daughters there to live. “Today in Russia it is a crime to be educated,” he said. “It is a crime to be well-dressed, to wear a clean collar. People are murdered in the

streets for just such reasons. The mob is drunk with blood, and thirsts for more. But the tragedy ‘of Russia must be over soon. After all, there are 180,000,000 inhabitants, and they are not all fools. The irony of the situation is that the peasants who have suffered oppression silently for years are not responsible for the present chaos. It is no rebellion of the oppressed. The ringleaders are agitators from the working classes, men employed in factories, whose arrogance and brutality know .no limit.”

Koscak Yamada, the celebrated Japanese composer and conductor of the Philharmonic Society of Tokio, Japan, is at present touring America, and has been lecturing in New York on Japanese music, past and present, with illustrations by singers and dancers in costume.