GRAMOPHONE NOTES
MAY brings a superb recording by Denis Matthews of Mozart's pianoforte sonata in A minor (K3to) Col. DX 1114-5. I recommend this warmly to all music lovers, and to those who still imagine that Mozart's pianoforte sonatas are so simple that they can be played by schoolgirls. So they can, in a way, but not as Mozart wrote them and as Denis Matthews plays them. This young pianist is remarkably gifted and has a great career before him. I hope the Gramophone Company will lose no time in getting him to make further recordings. Another fine Mozart recording—although in my opinion, not quite as good as Denis Matthews'—is Menuhin and the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Dr. Malcolm Sargent in Mozart's Violin Concerto in D (K216) H.M.V. DB 6146-8.
Contemporary compositions ought not to be neglected and so I welcome Myra Hess's recording of a Sonata in F minor by Howard Ferguson, H.M.V.3335-7. Admirers of Rachmaninov's music, of whom I am not one, ought to get great pleasure from this sonata, which has many of his musical qualities but is a cleaner work than most of Rachmaninov's pianoforte music, less loosely festooned with sickly, cloying harmonies, less stabbed through with patches of hectic emotion ; but, for that very mason, Mr. Ferguson will never have so large a public. This reminds me that a gifted com- poser who is still without a public—the Austrian, Anton von Webern —was almost a contemporary of Rachmaninov (he was born ten years later, in 1883) and last week, at a Walter Goehr concert at the Wigmore Hall, some orchestral pieces of his were played. These are highly original, of outstanding 1111121ity and they should be recorded, with other works of his that may be available, for his was quite a new note in modern music and any one of these pieces is worth all of Rachmaninov's eclectic outpourings.
David Lloyd is a tenor with a very attractive voice and I think many will enjoy his singing of Edward German's "The English Rose," and Lane Wilson's version of " My Lovely Celia " with Gerald Moore at the Piano. Col. DB 2109. W. J. T.
Previous page
