12 JUNE 1947, Page 13

MUSIC

IT ought by rights to have been an eventful week with " the greatest musical event of all time " starting on June 7th, for that is how the advertisements describe the series of concerts which are to take place in the Harringay Arena during the next four weeks. The list of conductors and soloists is impressive, the programmes less so and the Harringay Arena least of all. Music critics should be getting into training for their far-flung festival activities later in the summer, and orchestral concerts at Harringay and opera at Lewes are a good preparation for the circular tour which may take them to Chelten- ham, Edinburgh, Gloucester Norwich and Leeds. I suppose Harringay is the antipode to Bayreuth—and none the worse for that —but it is disconcerting for one brought up in the tail-end of the ivory tower tradition. I had a ringside seat for the first night, though I moved later to where the ices were being hawked and really heard better there though the large, flat arena with a comparatively low roof played odd tricks with the sound and deadened the impact on the ear, so that Rossini, Beethoven and Wagner sounded oddly alike. Paolo Silveri was audible when he faced me, and Solomon's Beethoven sounded excellently played when it was not obscured by various extraneous sounds ; but music at Harringay is a technical feat and no more, a pleasure than music at the Albert Hall—which is not even a technical feat, but is much less trouble to reach.

Jose Iturbi is a pianist with a quite remarkable range and sense of tone colour, and I was sorry that he gave so exclusively popular a programme at the Albert Hall on June 5th. Chopin is not his music, for, like many Spanish musicians, he seems to find the Italian cantabile element in music difficult to manage. Rhythm and colour his playing certainly has, but line, on the whole, not ; and it was therefore surprising that, in a dull programme, what stood out was the beautiful moulding of the first movement of the " Moonlight " sonata, while Albeniz's Navarra sounded oddly colourless. It is in any case a miracle if a pianist can bring any interest to a programme of ancient chestnuts played in the Albert Hall, where the vast majority of fine points are inevitably lost and the audience applauds equally hysterically after each number provided only that it is familiar