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WHERE did it come from, where has it been hiding all these years? I speak of the intent crowd which has been listening at the Festival Hall to the complete Beethoven string quartets from the Op. 18 group (1800) to the final harvest- ing, Op. 130 and beyond.
The Hungarian String Quartet are expatriates based on America. leader Zoltan Szekely. With this or other consorts they have been in chamber music for thirty years or more. Their white or bald, grey or greying heads are in themselves a tale of devotion. Yet, in programmes that called for exceptional muscle, nerve and mind, they acquitted themselves like men in their first prime. They were brought over here for the Beethoven cycle by the Festival Hall management. Was it prudent for the GLC to stick its neck out impresario-wise? At the outset there must have been a butterfly or two in South Bank stomachs. The upshot is jubilation.
At six concerts a hall with capacity increased to 2,700 by extra seats on and behind the platform and has consistently 'played' to over 80 per cent. Two-thirds of the seats sold at six shillings each. An easy way of pulling 'em- in, the cynic will say. But there was no taint whatever of bargain-basement fever about the people who were pulled in. They were people one doesn't see at the Festival Hall in the ordinary way; more young people than usual, some of them casually, none freakishly dressed. There was a noticeable ratio of middle-aged Central European couples. The point is: they all listened, didn't stare around, didn't miss a note or inflection, scrupu- lously kept their stirrings and coughings till the end of a movement. A lot of score-reading went ea. Some of the scores had a dog-eared, handed-
down look, with spines faded from years on parental or second-hand shelves.
Clearly the great bond, the passion that unified thousands, was Ludwig van Beethoven. HOW acquired? Probably, in most cases, by years of radio and record listening. There was no need to apologise, as the programme foreword almost did, for the Festival Hall's lack of chamber music 'ambience.' In these matters ambience is not a thing of plush and gilt or chrome and glass. It is something an audience secretes or brines with it.
In short. here was a musical Elect. I had this feeling all the way through, whatever business the Hungarians had in hand at any given moment— whether they were crisping up incomparable scherzos: or 'breathing' sublime adagios that seem to intimate what life is about, and death. too; or arguing away in polyphonies that super- sede earth-bound logic with syllogisms from beyond the stars. One mustn't over-worship, of course. In Beethoven's hands when he's nodding variation-form is capable of reducing the liveliest theme to dogsbody. Even the Hungarians can't give shine to dogsbody's coat. Nor can they, any more than a consort of archangels could, play the Grosse Fuge (which they did at their conclud- ing concert this week in its original context, the Quartet in B flat Op. 130) without producing. more ill-favoured sounds than agreeable ones. It isn't merely that in the Grosse Fuge Beethoven overstrained the solo-string medium. It seems to me that on top of this he was bent on giving us the hell in terms of musical idea. If the jagging. jerking rhythm of 'Subject B,' as Vincent d'Indy named it, had gone on a bar longer last Monday I should have been removed shrieking. It is fair to add that there was no sign of distress from my 2,600 or so co-listeners. Probably they felt none. Probably the Grosse Fuge has lucidities and beauties for them that are a closed book for me. They shall have the benefit of the doubt. For, as audiences go. they are a fine, wise lot.
Are Klemperer audiences equally wise, equally fine? What is it that primarily moves them? That beaked, thrown-back profile? That head which, as the Epstein bronze reminds us, has something in it of both the eagle and the eagle's crag? Or the fierce stoicism that brought him through ills and accidents which would have muted a dozen other men for ever? It is natural enough that character metal of so rare a sort should be publicly saluted. But it is precisely here that confusion is apt to arise.
At the second of his two concerts with the New Philharmonia Orchestra Dr. Klemperer got a standing ovation for his Symphonic. Fantastique. Was this a tribute to Old (and Splendid) Indomit- able? Or to his handling of Berlioz's score? Cer- tainly the performance was memorable in more ways than one. Tempi were wide of tradition, though not innovatory in any light-giving way. Sometimes they lacked sentiment. Sometimes they were rigid and irksomely slow. These, admittedly, are matters into which personal taste enters. But one thing was objectively bad.
Before the 'Scene aux champs,' Dr. Klemperer sent his gifted principal oboe, Terence Mac- donagh, into the wings to play offstage in the famous duet with cor anglais. At the end of the duet Mr. Macdonagh had to edge his way back disturbingly through the music. The usual practice is to have a third oboe specially posted in the wings, preferably a player with a 'voice," and style of his own to heighten the sense of remoteness and colloquy. 'Usual practices' are not to be squashed just because they are usual. Each must be considered on its own merits. In this case the merits are clear.
CHARLES REID
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