CONTEMPORARY ARTS
CHAMBER MUSIC
Now that the old Queen's Hall is being rebuilt, it is to be hoped that the need for a smaller hall, suitable for chamber music, will be borne in mind. Two visits to the Recital Room at the Festival Hall this week have convinced me that it leaves virtu- ally everything to be desired, both for the listener and the player. The listener must either sit on top of the players—which is bad for both parties—or else view them sideways at the end of a tunnel. The chairs, too, though possibly elegant functional works of art, do not fulfil satisfactorily their basic function of accommodating with reasonable comfort the human frame. They support the back at the wrong place and lay an undue amount of the onus of upholstery on the sitter. The Festival Hall itself, where I attended another chamber music concert, is too big ; it makes posi- tively cruel demands on the players, exag- gerating every slightest blemish of tone or intonation and almost enabling the listener to follow the players' fingers from string to string. With the Wigmore Hall virtually booked as a see des Mutants or for the less popular recital, London urgently needs a concert-hall where, for example, the Amadeus Quartet can be heard in comfort by their large following of enthusiasts.
For chamber music, though not in any sense popular, has more followers than the vast empty spaces of the Festival Hall would have suggested on December 15th, when the Hirsch Quartet and Louis Kentner played quintets by Franck and Dvorak. The Franck quintet has aged badly. Rhapsodical and soulful, the music seems always about to come to the point but continually breaks off into passionate or lachrymose asides. There is much too much doubling or rank unison playing for the strings, while the piano indulges in miniature concertos of its own. Yet what admiration this work has aroused in the past I And, in dispraising it, how I offend the names of one of my eminent predecessors in this column, W. J. Turner ! The Amadeus were in excellent form. The Haydn quartet they had chosen was Op. 54 No. 2, published in the year that the French Revolution burst on the world and Haydn himself became a Freemason. The slow movement, though hardly reflecting the deep disquiet of the times, contains a most passionate soliloquy for the first violin—a florid C minor recitative with repeated notes which keep gathering momentum and recall the technique of the Hungarian cimbalom, which Haydn doubtless knew. The final, with its alternating adagio and presto episodes, is a restless movement which is not wholly satisfactory in its place and leaves the listener feeling that perhaps another movement should follow. Tippett's second quartet showed the players at their best. Played by any but those who have got their intricacies so much by heart as to be almost second nature, these complete cross-rhythms and shifted stresses can easily sound fussy and destroy each other ; but this perform- ance gave the music its full due and the work stood out plainly as one of the best things Tippett has done, if not the best. I should like to hear Rubbra's second quartet accorded the same treatment. Is there any real reason why chamber music should be less attractive to the ordinary listener than that played by a full orchestra ? Or is it simply that good quartets are so very much rarer—and with reason—than good orchestras ? The attraction exercised by the few first-class quartets is already great and might well, with a better concert-hall for them to play in, become greater.
MARTIN COOPER
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