MUSIC
A MARKED feature of musical life in the middle of the twentieth century is the giving of practical expression to the findings of in- satiable scholarship. An apparently n- satiable curiosity about the music of the Past consumes some of our best practising I' musicians. • In a happier age, perhaps, their 'gifts and energies might be expended in a .more directly creative way ; but since it teems we are fated to live very largely on the ;music of the past, it is wholly admirable that ' We should learn to extend our repertory of `old music and that some of our best Inusicians should transform themselves into Performing scholars and breathe, pluck or , bow life into works which have in many Cases remained without adequate perform- - Mice for centuries. It is no exaggeration to say that twenty years ago a museum of Musical instruments was a museum, and it Was nothing more. Now it has become a Potential concert-hall and he would be a • bold man who would speak to a member of the Galpin Society of an obsolete musical instrument.
Thurston Dart and George Malcolm are two of the most distinguished of these Performer-scholars of early music and both nave been playing in London this last Week. They were two of the four harpsi- Chord-players (Eileen Joyce and Denis „Vaughan were the other two) who played in lue annual concert of works for three and Lour harpsichords, which took place at the vestival Hall on Tuesday. Three of the .cplicertos played on this occasion were by L S. Each—two for three and one for four ....uarpsichords—and one by Mozart, the early IC..242. In fact the programme can hardly vary from year to. year, unless more com- posers imitate George Malcolm and compose 1.;. Work specially for this combination. 1alcolm's Variations for four harpsichords Were on a theme of Mozart's and imitated very closely—with remarkable skill and.great .,!leity indeed—that composer's manner. The music was frankly pastiche but pastiche executed with a. fineness of workmanship, a sympathetic understanding and a nice sense of both humour and pathos, so that it formed the sincerest kind of homage to Mozart's memory. It also displayed for both connoisseur and uninitiate the extra- ordinary range of expression, tone-quality and dynamics of which the harpsichord is capable. Carefully organised, amplification and placing of instruments and orchestra (20-24 members of the LSO under Boris Ord) insured against the inaudibility and faulty balance which had been subjects of complaint at earlier concerts. The cult of the harpsichord—for it is a cult, which easily assumes the proportions of an obsession in the minds of some devotees— is as rich as any other, it seems, in comic hangers-on. One young Cambridge ex- quisite behind me murmured to his com- panion, "The orchestra's too big"—this was before the overture to Handel's Samson— "the whole thing's wrong. You'll just have to shut your eyes." The awful array of twenty-five instruments, where our grand- fathers would hardly have thought 250 excessive, so offended these sensitive eyes, it seems, that the owner forgot to stop his ears. Earlier in the week George Malcolm conducted the London Music Group in a performance of Machaut's Messe Notre Dame. No scholar can claim to have dis- covered any one right way of performing fourteenth-century music; and the very small number of voices and instruments employed on this occasion 'hardly gave an idea of music written for a large, vaulted building with a high roof like a Gothic cathedral. Strange that we have come to play nineteenth-century orchestral music in cathedrals and have to sing Machaut in a 'recital-room.' Nevertheless this was an interesting introduction for the layman to a music which is still as good as unknown. except to a few specialists.
MARTIN COOPER
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