Music
Bournemouth on a Shoestring
By DAVID CAIRNS
BOURNEMOUTH is a place of surprises. One never' knows where one is with it. The hotel trade may be booming, as I discovered on Saturday night when I tried some 157 different hotels, in the centre of town for a room. But when Stratford recently combed the entire city for a wicker bath- chair, they found only one, in a museum, and that not made of wicker. And this eminently respectable resort, with its splendid natural set- tings and its buildings standing in heavy Philistine obliviousness, like Conservative con- ferences shocked into stone, on cliffs licked by a vast and hungry sea, houses a lively and com- petent symphony orchestra. Yet the town suspends its orchestra by a shoestring.
Last week Bournemouth showed its better side. By that I mean not only the annual meeting of the Bournemouth East Conservative Asso- ciation, at which a speaker who described Major Friend as 'a very gallant gentleman' was unceremoniously shouted down, but an even greater sign of grace, the Easter Music Festi- val. In the course of five days the public, migrant and resident, was offered six orchestral concerts, including such West of England rarities as the Spring Symphony, Belshazzer's Feast, Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony, the Scene d'Amour from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet and Blacher's Paganini Variations. And the public, on the whole, took the offer. As 1 walked to the Winter Gardens for the Britten and Walton concert, I had the impression that the whole population was queueing to sec Carry on Nurse ('every possible type of patient is gathered together in this grand holiday film'), but the audience in the concert hall was large and enthusiastic.
For the orchestra the festival was only an inten- sification of labours that are continually formid- able. It gives 240 concerts a year, and toils exhaustingly up and down the West Country. And it does so on subsidies which in a German town of half the size would be regarded as proof of swinish indifference to art. The case-history of the Bournemouth Orchestra is typical of the social status of art, a dozen years after the Wel- fare State and the Arts Council. Art in England is a beggar—a beggar with prospects, but a beggar none the less. Till 1954 the orchestra, municipally established, had cost the corporation something of the order of a twopenny rate. At that point the Musicians' Union put up the basic wage. Whereupon the councillors swelled, re- membered their heritage and those ancient British truths—that unions are bad and art must pay its way—and kicked the orchestra into the street. There it was found in a moribund condition by a few rich patrons who nourished the anarchist doctrine that good music is not entirely a matter of sound business, and set on its feet, where five years later it stands, an ornament to the per- tinacity and shrewd management of the Western Orchestral Society if not to the enlightenment of the councillors of Bournemouth.
But in scraping together just under a penny rate (after an eightpenny rate has duly gone to bowl- ing greens and tennis courts), and in then taking back a fifth of the resultant subsidy as rent for the use of the hall, the corporation is acting in a rather more generous and civilised manner than any other comparable town council. The feebleness of its comparative enlightenment merely shows up the general state of barbarism.
The orchestra can hardly be accused of wanting to be spoonfed. But its predicament shows the kind of cramped and stony existence that is im- posed on even the toughest and most resourceful growth in the vacant lots of England outside the metropolitan hothouse (as it seems to struggling provincial musicians). The orchestra is busily spreading its roots. A• scheme is on foot to proselytise the youth of Bournemouth by putting on concerts whose programmes have been ex- pressly chosen by them. A request to all the towns which the orchestra visits, to support it with a sixteeenth of a penny rate, may bring in enough to meet the annual deficit of £8,500. But this will only enable it to keep alive at subsistence level. The players will still have to give 240 concerts a year, mostly at wages of £13 10s. a week. This is mass-production music. The surpris- ing and admirable thing is that good performances are given by players stretched so hard. One finds not shoddiness and stale routine, but a reasonably disciplined enthukiasm. The performance of Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony was im- mensely powerful, dramatic and concentrated, presenting it in a single sweep, with such fiery conviction that doubts (which can pose them- selves awkwardly in this work) whether the music is fully equal to the idea which drives it, withered. into insignificance. But the fact that Charles Groves and the orchestra sometimes achieve such standards in spite of all the obstacles of over- performing and under-rehearsing is all the more reason for supporting them adequately. Arts Council grants have crept up from time to time, but usually to meet some sudden crisis, such as an increase in union rates. The new funds are quickly absorbed, and the basic situation remains as before. In Belshazzar's Feast and the Spring Symphony, in spite of moments of prodigious excitement, the lack of adequate funds and there- fore of adequate rehearsal, told both in detailed mistakes and. in a general want of security—the forces involved had met for the first time that morning. It is the olli story. The nation can get its music on the cheap if it wants to. But assertions of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon culture should be left t the Empiretoyalists.
The c state of English music was ironically demonstrated the other day when the concert halls of central London came out in a sudden rash of modernism. Within a couple of miles, from Marylebone to North Lambeth, there was a simultaneous choice of a Wcbern quartet, a Stravinsky concerto, a symphony by Humphrey Searle and wind quintets by Schoenberg, Fricker and Wilhelm Pijper. At the Wigrnore Hall ICA concert the superb Danzi Quintet gave perform- ances of a brillianCe, ease and expressiveness that deserved, and could have converted, an audience of hundreds. They were heard by about thirty people.
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