M u si c
[OPERA AT THE ALBERT HALL]
IT went without saying that most of the criticism of the Chaliapine performances at the Albert Hall last Tuesday would be directed against obvious blemishes. Of course, we heard all about the famous Echo, which has now become almost a personality in our journalistic life. We were told, too (as if we did not already know it) that Rimsky- Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri was essentially a chamber opera, and that the Albert Hall is anything but a chamber. these discoveries were laboured to the exclusion of more important points. The occasion was, in effect, the beginning of Mr. C. B. Cochran's rule at the Albert Hall. He tells us that the productions of Mozart and Salieri and of the Tavern Scene from Bori's Godounov realized only a part of his ambitions. Other productions, embodying even greater technical feats, are to follow, and we may confidently expect that such shortcomings as there were on Tuesday evening will be remedied. I, for one, have no doubt in my mind that with the reasonable co-operation of Press criticism, Mr. Cochran will solve the enormous problems which the Albert Hall presents ; such criticism, however, must forswear clielVs and all manner of facetious comment.
Already we have been given more than a hint of what is to follow. The simple beauty of M. Polunin's decor, both for Rimsky-Korsakov's opera and the Boris scene, was entrancing. By means of overhead lighting (two sets of lamps whose beams met at an angle of about forty degrees) the scenes were projected from the black background to produce the effect of wood-cuts in colour. The intimacy, which some professed to find lacking, was brought about by the intense concentration which these pictures compelled
from the far-flung audience ; by this—and also by Chaliapine's genius for measuring gesture, in terms of distance and of time. Salieri and Varlaam—two more vividly contrasted roles could hardly be found—became so fully real in his hands that his mother-tongue seemed to be endowed with a universal sense. There was something of the slow deliberation of film technique in his methods ; yet he never once resorted to the gross exaggeration of the " close-up."
Mr. Albert Coates, who conducted the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Choral Society in these productions and in excerpts from Mozart's Requiem, provides an admirable counterpart to Chaliapine's conceptions. Both can conceive broadly, intensely, and with dignity ; and since the same can be said of Mr. C. B. Cochran, there was a splendid unity to be discerned in everything we saw and heard ; moreover I was fortunate in being allotted a seat around which no freakish echo played, and no ghost sang.
BASIL MAINE,
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