MUSIC
Two concerts given by string orchestras during the last week have provided interesting points of comparison and given an opportunity for assessing the weakness and strength of our players in this, the most important department of orchestral and probably of all instrumental playing. We have outlived the reaction against the cantabile, when composers were proud of writing, string parts for the trumpet, speaking parts for the voice and xylophone parts for. the pianoforte ; and the strings, dispossessed for a decade or two, have come into their own again. The octogenarian Strauss's Metamorphosen might have been a work commissioned to celebrate this happy restoration. Written for twenty-three solo stringed instruments, these symphonic metamorphoses of two themes, themselves declaring their proud Wagnerian ancestry, form a noble pendant to the Siegfried Idyll and Schonberg's Verklarte Nacht. This noble and rich style, rhetorical in the best sense of a word now sadly sunken in popular usage, called us back not—as in so many of Strauss's later works—to the world of the Rosenhavalier but to Tristan ; and there were moments when we seemed to be listening to the musings of King Mark, very old now and very generous, recol- lecting old passions in the tranquillity of extreme old age but always intent on " the pity of it".
The Jacques Orchestra, under their new conductor John Pritchard, expressed all the strength, if not all the sweetness, of this music. Their playing of Handel's G major Concerto Grosso showed their fine discipline, their good sense of rhythm and the " body " of their ensemble. But bouquet they still lack ; and the solo passages of Bliss's Music for Strings showed that perfect intonation cannot yet be taken for granted.
In the Boyd Neel Orchestra's Bach concert two nights later these faults were even more noticeable. The personnel of this orchestra must be unfortunately-4f also inescapably—variable for the third Brandenburg Concerto to be given such a rough and almost disastrous passage. Two fugues from the Art of Fugue showed signs of a much more careful preparation, but the orchestra never gave the impression of a body of singing instruments. No one wishes our strings to aim at a steady maximum of rich golden tone—this is only in place in the gipsy fiddling of night clubs—but a looser, more liquid tone (perhaps a looser right arm ?) would add a quality which almost all our string-
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