MUSIC
NORMAN DEL Max and the Central London Orchestra chose a very ambitious and excellently original programme for their concert at the Chelsea Town Hall on December znd. Chabrier's overture to Gwendoline, d'Indy's Symphonie Cevenole and Roussel's Third Symphony are works which are very seldom played in England and deserve to be much better known. Unfortunately, all three are scored for a large orchestra, which meant that the Chelsea Town Hall was far too small for them ; and they also demand a high standard of orchestral playing, both individual performance and the co-ordina- tion of ensemble, which was lacking. It is the old dilemma : either a programme of chestnuts which the orchestra knows well and need rehearse very little, or unfamiliar works the cost of whose adequate rehearsal is quite prohibitive. Chausson's Pointe de l'Amour et de la Mer, on the other hand, raised a different problem. Only a chamber orchestra is needed, and anything larger drowns the voice part and draws attention to Chausson's habit of inflating a simple idea with rhetorical wind, in the shape of arpeggios, broken chords and tremolando passages. Margaret Field-Hyde sang with great sensibility, but waged a vain battle against a grossly overloaded accompaniment. French Wagnerian amorous melancholy corre- sponds to almost nothing on either the aesthetic or emotional map of the average modern listener, and I suspect many, like myself, rather tolerated the gusts of death-devoted love for the sake of the still small voice of Massenet which sounds so unexpectedly and with such charm in Le Temps des Lilas.
At the recital given by Lucienne Tragin and Francis Poulenc in the Wigmore Hall on December 4th it was a very different musical world—though the Ariettes Oubliees of Debussy are exactly contem- porary with Chausson's Paine die l'Amour et de la Mer, and Ravel's Deux Epigrammes date from only half-a-dozen years later. Mme. Tragin started with airs by Bach, Lully and Mozart, and it was interesting to see how entirely unlike are the demands made on the singer by this earlier music to those made by Debussy and Ravel. The purely musical, lyrical quality of an air from Mozart's Ii Re Pastore and the unsophisticated, early humour of Bach's Phoebus and Pan are respectively Italian and German. With Lully the declamatory element is strong, and the dramatic presentation of the music—a sense of period and style, a deliberate and consciously accepted artificiality—is of the first importance. In Debussy's settings of Verlaine a sensitive appreciation of the poem, a beautiful and perfectly adapted diction, are quite as important as a beautiful musical tone ; and the piano part, needless to say, is as important as the vocal. This is Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk perfectly understood by a Frenchman, and in this complicated mixture of the arts Mme. Tragin excelled. Ravel's settings of two sixteenth-century poems are almost the earliest example of his ability to write original and moving music in a borrowed style—of what one might call his creative use of pastiche—and they are more successful and paradoxically more natural-sounding than the Noel des Puets whose text he wrote him- self. The final group showed M. Poulenc's familiar skill and light- ness of touch.
It is a commonplace that the artistic sense and remarkable tech- nique of Segovia can make any of his musical undertakings, however hazardous—and who else would think of playing the Bach Chaconne on the guitar ?—a complete success. But I was sceptical about a guitar concerto, even so. Wrongly, of course. Castelnuovo-Tedesco's discrimination in writing for a chamber orchestra and using material which could be shared by the strings and the guitar without an un- comfortable strain on either was admirable ; and Segovia's ease and naturalness of manner perfectly matched the discreet and unpre- tentious character of the music. At the same concert (Cambridge Theatre, December 7th) the New London Orchestra played the ballet suite from Gretry's Cephale at Procris in a modern orchestration which lends additional charm to what is already lightness and grace
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