MUSIC The Philharmonia Concert Society
FROM tie Philharmonic String Quartette led by Mr. Henry Holst and various similarly named combinations of first-rate instrumentalists, formed originally for the purpose of recording chamber music, there has now developed a concert-giving society with a small orchestra of its own, which played for the first time at the Kingsway Hall last Saturday under Sir Thomas Beecham.
The programme, like the three succeeding ones in the series, was devoted to Mozart, and included besides the great Symphony in G minor, the no less beautiful Clarinet Concerto (K.622), the early Divertimento in D (K.I31) and a selection of the German Dances. The conductor's stately progress (Lento e maestoso) towards the rostrum does not indicate any slowing-down of his vitality once he gets there. Indeed I thought he took the finale of the Symphony a great deal too fast. It was certainly exhilarating and the orchestra was able to stay the course without getting breathless. But, the fact that the movement can be made to move at a speed approaching that of the latest aircraft, is no justification for making it do so. We missed some of the wayside beauty in our swift passage.
For the rest the performances were as admirable as Sir Thomas Beecham can make them when he has command of an orchestra entirely malleable to his supple wrists. It was a particular pleasure to hear the early Divertimento so beautifully played. It is astonishing, almost unbelievable, that a boy of sixteen should have possessed the technical skill to fashion these movements, let alone the invention to create such things, beautiful by any standard, as the second minuet with its four horns, and the finale. There is not, of course, the depth of feeling, derived from experience, that informs the G minor Sym- phony and the Clarinet Concerto, but the sensibility is there just the same. And how interested he was, evenat the bitterest time of his life, in any novel means of making beautiful music, so that for the imperial routs he could devise a combination at once so amusing and so enchanting as the sleigh-bells and posthorns, and the " Canary "
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