MUSIC
THE visit of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra ended on October 6th, when Bruno Walter conducted a magnificent perform- ance of Schubert's seventh symphony. The night before, Furtwangler had conducted the same orchestra in Beethoven's ninth, an individual reading which, compared with the Walter concert, brought forcibly to my mind Goethe's perhaps too easy equation of the romantic with disease and the classical with health. The particular charac- teristics of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra are generally known and admitted—the beauty and nobility of their string tone, the subordination of the woodwind, the dark tone-colour of the brass and the homogeneity or fine blend of their ensemble. What struck me most forcibly during their present visit was the effortlessness and discretion of the strings, which were especially noticeable in Schubert's C major symphony. In the same way the string tone sometimes sounded small and unimposing, until one realised that it was deep and pure and unaccompanied by the slight rasp to which too many of our orchestras have accustomed us.
Claudio Arrau's programme at Drury Lane on October 9th included all seventeen of Schumann's Etudes Symphoniquet, and reminded a forgetful public that Schumann could write a great deal more than scenes mignonnes when he gave his mind to it. The five "posthumous variations" are on the whole less brilliant and more meditative than the other twelve, and their inclusion gives the whole work a more solemn and austere character. Arrau treated the music with a fierce objectivity and concentration ; there was no place for technical display or the more kittenish graces which have their place even in Schumann's most solemn works. But the intellectuality of his playing, the vital expressiveness of every note of every phrase and the subordination of every part to the vision of the whole were as impressive here as they were in the Waldstein sonata.
Satic's Sports et Divertissements are thumbnail sketches, some- times apt but more often deliberately inept, with that particular form of ineptitude which the composer made for a time fashionable. Perhaps these little pieces would be more successful if each member of the audience could follow the drawings which they were designed to illustrate ; but that is equivalent to saying that this is not music for the concert-hall, which is what I really felt.
Arrau cast his searching light on two very different facets of Raver
genius—Alborada del Gracioso, which was dazzling technically and unusually seriously treated, and Oiseaux Tristes, a magnificent and rare piece of French "expressionism." Only the Sarabande of Debussy's Pour le piano was wholly successful (and shows, incident- ally, what Satie's earliest ideas could become in the hands of a real musical genius). The two other movements were given too much gravity and too little grace—possibly a compliment to Debussy, but
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