Old Offenders
MUSIC HERE were three Prom performances under I Sir Malcolm Sargent last week that brought men up from the cells, put them on appeal and pleaded their case persuasively. Sibelius, Delius and Vaughan Williams are wrong 'uns un- doubtedly. All three are, or have been, in varying degrees and for different lengths of time, un- fashionable; and to be unfashionable is a major crime in the musical calendar.
So far as his Seventh Symphony is concerned, Sibelius deserves to be let off with a caution, to say the least. Its one-movement form involved Sibelius in problems of transition which he didn't really solve and no conductor can quite conceal. But there are incidents and stretches which I would cross any road to hear, even Kensington Gore at rush hour. For sustained gravity and a quality which I can only define as goodness, there is nothing in music that quite compares with the thirty or forty bars of slow, hushed polyphony early on, mainly for divided strings. Sargent and the BBC Symphony Orch- estra did well by these and much else.
They were joined the following night by three solo singers and a portentous pile-up of choirs (two BBC lots, the Alexandra, the Harrow and the Royal Choral) for Delius's A Mass of Life (1905), a work which portended (and achieved) so little that the genuflections of Beecham and Heseltine ('. . grandeur, breadth of vision, over- whelming beauty . . . equal to the most monu- mental achievements of the great masters') read bewilderingly today.
That there are nice bits, who will deny? Bari- tone meditations on nightfall and the songs of lovers are softly garlanded by women's voices; horn-calls brood and the oboe inlays its silver laments across dreaming strings—effects which, as will be observed, evoke matching prose. But sometimes, too often, indeed, the women drop their vocal garlands and la-la-la or tra-la-la with a vapidity which makes my heart sink. The score as a whole is so overloaded with homophonic writing and chromatic down-slithers that long before the end I craved for a refreshing cupful of good, plain part-writing. Anything would have done, even a counterpoint exercise by Ebenezer Prout. As in the days when Beecham used to conduct it, I came away from A Mass of Life feeling that Delius lacked the technique and structural vision either to illumine Nietzsche's (translated) poetry and attitudinisings or to give valid shape and punch to so long and com- plexly-scored a piece.
Now to the third appellant, Vaughan Williams. Nothing could have been handsomer, con- sidered as performance, than Sargent's revival of the London Symphony (1914): everything solid, smooth-surfaced—and fervent. I dearly wish I could have shared in the fervour. Things that always put me off, almost at the start, are two thematic features: a five-note bit which is first spat out by muted trumpets on page 10, and an up-lunging tune first heard fifteen pages later for tuba, trombones and other browbeaters. These themes 'express' or cite Cockney cheek and Edwardian music-hall. They express these things so remorselessly that I feel obliged from the word go (as do many analysts more respect- ful than myself) to accept the whole symphony not as music but rather as a social document or picture-guide to the Strand and Radcliffe High- way. The scherzo-nocturne has six agreeable bars of mouth-organ on muted horns and muted strings. But here again the quote is a gum label to tell us where and among whom we are; there is no attempt to go on from topography and turn it into music, as Puccini and Stravinsky did with hurdy-gurdy tunes and timbres in It Tabarro and Petrushka. Or as Alban Berg did with a flagrant and superb pop tune, tenth of Wedekind's Lauterlieder, in the orchestral varia- tions that bridge the last two scenes of Lulu.
Which brings me back, as undertaken last week, to Pierre Boulez.
The Berg-Wedekind variations—part of the so-called Lulu Symphony (in which Halina Lukomska sang the soprano fragments with un- common ease and radiance)—were outstanding among Boulez's good conducting marks at the Proms. After swinging out and pom-pomming nobly on the unison horns, pop tune subsided into polytonal jungle with a fearsome, inverted logic that I cannot remember to have been brought out to such effect before. This was gratifying—and surprising.
We already knew of Boulez's immaculate Debussy. In the last of the Three Nocturnes he made the wordless women's chorus sound for once in a way as if sung by the sire.nes they are supposed to be, instead of the jumpy, acid- voiced housewives we usually hear. Webern's Six Orchestral Pieces Op. 6 melted in the mouth. I cannot pretend that I was converted into a thirsting, open-mouthed believer by his account of three other Webern works—the Orchestral Variations Op. 30 and the two Cantatas Op. 21 and 29, in which latter Miss Lukomska was joined by Barry McDaniel (bass) and the un- conquerable BBC Chorus. At the same time I was enormously impressed by the lucid authority with which, having analysed these tightly argued yet wispy scores and taken them apart in his mind, he put the bits and pieces together again. His reading of The Rite of Spring had every- thing (transparency, balance and rhythmic ruth- lessness included) except, somehow, size. Most of us regard The Rite' as an epic piece. We may be hopelessly wrong, but that is how it hits us and how we 'live' it; we can't get the idea out of our heads. For all his doctrinal insistence on emotion as an essential partner with intellect in music, M Boulez seemed to be treating The Rite less as an epic than as a bundle of logar- ithms. One of his programmes included a Piano Concerto No.-4 in G major, with Daniel Baren- boim as soloist. The concerto underwent such slimming and refinement at M Boulez's and Mr Barenboim's hands that I looked to see whether the composer was Ludwig von Chaminade.
_ After all these experiences the Berg-Wedekind variations proved an important thing: that Boulez as conductor is capable in the concert- hall of broad strokes as well as of precision en- gineering; of opulent colours as well as pastel shades.
CHARLES REID
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