THE RETURN and ELEGY

Te Ao Hou, December 1968, Page 62

THE RETURN and ELEGY Poems by Alistair Campbell Music by Douglas Lilburn Kiwi SLD-13 33⅓ 12 in. L.P. To review The Return, I can think of no better way than to list the elements of what Douglas Lilburn calls a ‘sound image’. Distant traffic hum; faint wind; sea; wind; gulls; steam; hiss; tiny horns; hiccoughs; Mahi; muffled sob; Tane; kahikatea; kohekohe; tuatara, etc. A beautiful Maori voice (Mahi Potiki) softly intones a catalogue of Maori tree names and, at one point, an exquisite child's voice came through with ‘matai’ and ‘taraire’, reminding one of the beauty of the language we have so arrogantly supplanted and daily throttle. Let those who argue for anglicised Maori listen to this and reflect on the outrage we do every day to the most musical tongue in the world apart from Italian. Mr Lilburn establishes behind The Return, the last poem in Alistair Campbell's famous first volume, Mine Eyes Dazzle, a web of throbbing, delicate sound, never more than mezzoforte; the last images of a dying chief? The first of a Maori child, rocking in a flax cradle near a dull-glowing fire? Tim Eliott's fine voice was used for these same grave qualities; it stroked the images rather than propelled them; ‘gulls flung from the sea’, ‘the surf-loud beach’, ‘fires kindled in the wet sand’, ‘heads shrunken to a skull’. In the last lines of the poem, the sound image becomes explicit in ‘gods of the middle world/Their antique, bird-like chatter …’. The whole piece maintains the gravity of these lines, evoking a world of misty, mysterious shimmer. The reverse side of the disc is occupied by Mr Lilburn's beautiful setting of Alistair Campbell's Elegy. I must here confess that it took me some time to accept the Elegy, in Lilburn's setting. I have always enormously admired the Sings Harry sequence,

for its artfully casual and laconic lilt; it seemed to me at first that Lilburn had played over the starkness of Campbell's imagery, unwarrantably extending its bounds to areas not implicit in the poem. I had the same objections to it that I still have to Stravinsky's setting of Dylan Thomas's Villanelle (‘Do not go gentle into that good night’). Careful listening to the record (Gerald Christeller, baritone, Margaret Nielsen, piano) convinces me that I was wrong; voice and piano beautifully accommodate the poem's icy utterance and fierce glares and the references to Lorca and duende on the sleeve are exact: the austerity of feeling is close to Spain, recalling this from, I think, Sacheverell Sitwell: ‘Abrupt as when there's slid Its stiff gold blazing pall From some black coffin lid.’ The performance by the artists is admirable; Miss Nielsen's playing is ringingly clear, and M Christeller's beautiful diction and grave reverence for the poems and music make it a memorable performance. Kiwi Records has added to its already distinguished reputation in pioneering New Zealand works by these two admirable releases.