MUSIC
MAHLER's " Resurrection " Symphony at the Festival Hall on April 9th won the kind of reception traditionally reserved for a new work. It was not a very large audience, but there were well-thumbed scores in many non-professional hands (mostly hands no longer young), and, in a week during which both the Jewish Passover and the Christian Easter were celebrated, there were probably many post- Christians and post-Jews from the old Austro-Hungarian dominions to whom this concert was the celebration of a deep, if vague humanist faith as well as the poignant memorial of happier, more prosperous days when the naked evils of today were hardly even dreamed of.
Mahler was the last Imperial Austrian composer, a Jew from the Czech lands who became a Catholic but expressed in his life and his music an amalgam of tortured personal faith and naïve, nostalgic happiness that was both intensely individual and at the same time a unique expression of the thoughts and feelings -of the last generation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His music is rich with reflections and overtones of the Austrian past, with echoes of Austrian folk- songs and military marches and bugle-calls as well as reminiscences of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, the honorary as well as the indigenous citizens of Vienna. Its very inequalities, its frequent confusion of pathos and bathos, are intensely personal, and only endear it the more to those on whom none of its allusions are lost • and these formed the most enthusiastic section of the Festival Hall audience.
For them the great moments were the Urlicht contralto solo in the fourth and the Auferstehen chorus in the finale, Mahler's most poignant and " yearning "expressions of faith, hymns of a Church- less, doginaless religion of ideal emotional aspiration • and the Andante, which most charms the outsider and the purely musical connoisseur, is to them, perhaps, no more than an interlude or a kind. of appetiser for the great events of the last two movements. Under Josef Krips the performance was moving, and had enough of the old Austrian spirit to delight the old-timers • but, if even an outsider missed the sweet yearning quality that Mahler asks of his string- players, the devotees must have had this additional drop added to their cup of already brimming nostalgia.
Matyas Seiber's new string quartet, played at the R.B.A. Gal- leries on April 8th, revealed how another erstwhile subject of Franz Josef, of a younger generation, can keep alive in a different and much
severer idiom the tenderness and the lyrical impulse that are Mahler's greatest assets. This work, which was played with admirable style and finish by the Amadeus String Quartet, deserved its title of quartette lirico. Even on a first hearing the listener was not over- impressed by sheer workmanship, fine though that was ; and there was no sense of mannerism in music of such beautifully calculated expressive and dramatic quality.
The summer opera season at Covent Garden opened on Bank Holiday with a performance of Aida, conducted by Sir John Barbi- rolli, who elicited some very fine-spun and precise playing from the orchestra. Gre Brouwenstijn, as Aida, lacks dramatic power, sheer bigness and warmth of tone, but she brings both experience and musicianship to the part as well as a very pleasing voice. James Johnston—badly handicapped by his ludicrous clothes and a black wig several sizes too small—made a very serviceable though not a heroic Rhadames ; and Constance Shacklock's Amneris is a com- paratively dignified, though not yet a royal, figure, her voice lacking dramatic incisiveness and her movements and gestures the quality of imperiousness. Jess Walters's Amonasro was excellent, and his searing experiences as Wozzeck seem to have given him a new freedom and expressiveness, both as singer and actor.
MARTIN COOPER.
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