MUSIC
THE London Choral Society, conducted Liy John Tobin, have proved themselves as adventurous in their programmes as only those bodies can who are neither concerned with profit-making nor dependent on the co-operation of an orchestra. I think it was last year that they sang Rossini's Petite Messe, and this last week they included an unaccompanied Mass by Andre Caplet in their programme at iloly Trinity Church, Brompton Road.
Caplet's music is very little known in this country. He was a victim of the 1914-18 war, dying in 1925 at the age of fifty-three From a lung disease which was the direct result of being wounded and gassed. Caplet started life as a conductor, and he was an assistant to Edouard Colonne while he was still at the Paris Con- servatoire, which he left in 1901 as winner of the Grand Prix de Rome. It would be natural for a conductor to be primarily interested in his own instrument, the orchestra, but most of Caplet's composi- tions are either for voices or chamber-music compositions or both together, and only one of his major works—La Masque de la Mort Rouge, based on Poe—is written for orchestra.
The great discovery of Caplet's early years_and the greatest single influence on his music to the end of his life was the music of Debussy. He was a personal friend of the composer, an ardent apostle of his music (especially in America, where Caplet was director of music and conductor at Boston from 1910-14) and a transcriber of several of Debussy's works. More important still was his actual collaboration in the composition of two works—Gigues, the last composed of the three orchestral Images, and Le Mart yre de Saint Sebastien, whose first performance he conducted in 1911. His own Messe a Trois 1704, which the London Choral Society sang, was Composed eleven years later, but it has some of the characteristics of Debussy's religious music, though it is naturally much nearer the liturgical ideal than the "decorative music" of Le Martyre. In fact Caplet combines something of the freedom and melodic richness of Gregorian chant with the hieratic and atmospheric harmonies of Debussy. And one of the stranger paradoxes about this music is that it is the modern element that gives it a certain stiffness and occasional unreality, while the plain-song element provides the natural flow and the sense of unimpeded movement. Ideally the Mass phould be sung by either men's or women's voices only, and, although the composer permitted the mixed version sung by the London :Choral Society, it entails some unhappy examples of faulty balance and vocal registration.
Caplet's songs are occasionally sung in this country, among them some which show the profound effect of soldiering on a character whose sensitiveness was moral as well as aesthetic Now that we have had the Mass (which is well worth repeating) let us have another unaccompanied vocal work, Les Inscriptions Champetres and, most important of all, Le Miroir de Yesus written just after the Mass for string quintet, harp and three voices.
At the Albert Hall on May loth Iturbi revived the eighteenth- century practice of conducting from the piano a concerto in which he also played the solo part. Mozart's K.482 has a slow movement which needs more repose and concentration than any soloist could give who was also responsible for directing a modern orchestra accustomed to the elaborate and detailed instructions of the whole- time conductor. But Iturbi is a great Mozart player—easy, natural, sensitive without gushing, possessed of a clean palette and a clear, unveiled tone. A very young Spanish soprano, Consuclo Rubio, who sang at the same concert, has a voice of great freshness' admir- ably firm and pure. Her actual interpretations of Mozart, Wagner and Debussy were emotionally immature, and she needs several more years of less ambitious singing if her art is to be worthy of the actual voice—the vocal instrument—with which she has been
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