MUSIC
AT Covent Garden the last two operas of the Ring and Tristan have been added to the Wagner season ; and June brings Meister- 'singer and the much rarer Parsifal, so that the mature Wagner canon .will be complete this year. Set Svanholm was at his best in Siegfried, but in Gotterdanunerung and in Tristan his voice was plainly tired and its resilient, vigorous quality gone, leaving nothing but intelligence, experience and single-hearted musicianship for roles which require all these and a magnificent voice, heroic and lyrical, as well. We should be grateful to him for undertaking, and accomplishing so well, an enormous task ;, put more critical of Covent Garden for imposing such a task upon him. Kirsten Flagstad very wisely saved her strength by only appearing in the last Ring opera, where the majestic dignity of her singing and the monumental simplicity of her acting made her Brilnnhilde unforgettable. The Gibichung family were well cast. Sylvia Fisher's Gutrune was always well sung, and Marko Rothmtiller started well as Gunther ; but neither seemed able to maintain any distinct character after the opening scene, and they became, musically as well as dramatically, ciphers—which is not Wagner's intention. Gottlob Frick's Hagen was finely sung, and his voice has an unfailingly musical quality throughout its whole range and whatever the demands of the dramatic situation. Its colour, however, is not quite dark or 'grim enough for Hagen ; and there were moments— notably the summoning of the clan—when he was unable to dominate the auditorium from the middle-back heights of the Covent Garden stage. Apart from the singing of Kirsten Flagstad, this year's Ring has been most noticeable for the performances of the Nibelung brothers, Otakar Kraus as Alberich and Peter Klein as Mime ; and for the improvement in the standard of the orcheftral playing, which is still uncertain but moves on an altogether,,lugher level than in previous years. This uncertainty was felt, most unfortunately, in the opening of the Tristan prelude, conducted by Clemens Krauss, though during the rest of the performance the playing was well above the average. The Tristan cast was familiar from former years. Isolde is the Wagnerian role least temperamentally congenial
to Kirsten Flagstad ; but there is probably no singer living who can give so fine an all-round performance.
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At a concert on May 27th Iiouis Kentner played a Liszt programme for the recently-formed Liszt Society. The taste for Liszt's music depends on temperamental affinity ; and that affinity is to be found among the most sophisticated and the most naive, but seldom in the common run, of music-lovers. The sophisticated appreciate Liszt's originality, the anomalies and innovations in his harmony and the strong " period " flavour of his emotional effusiveness. ,The naive enjoy being dazzled and deafened by keyboard fireworks, and they arc excited by Liszt's peacock display of his own vitality, his coarse and brilliant colour and lavish use of the musical equivalents of gold lace and paste ornaments. In fact they enjoy the barbarian that lay not far beneath the urbane surface that Liszt showed to the world.
Louis Kentner played the wonderful " Weiner:. Klagen" Varia- tions in excellent style and with great technical accomplishment. I confess to finding only a small proportion of the best Liszt in the Dante sonata, but I thoroughly enjoyed Benediction de Dieu dans la Solitude, though it is far too long. Nor could Louis Kentner quite recapture the voluptuous atmosphere in which Liszt, like Lamartine, conducted his flirtations with the Ideal, toying with Faith and Doubt like a matinee idol with two pretty actresses, each of whom ho
preferred according to his mood. MARTIN COOPER.
ART
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