MUSIC
SIBELIUS 's eighty-eighth birthday on De- cember 8th was celebrated by the London Symphony Orchestra which gave a concert of his music at the Festival Hall, Anthony
Collins conducting. The orchestra has recently made a fine recording of Sibelius's first symphony under the same conductor, and this perhaps accounted for the inclusion in the programme of a work which has not, on the face of it, a particularly good claim to represent the composer's seven. This might surely have been an occasion for presenting the veteran with a performance of one of the " rare " numbers, four or six. What was even more strange—and was not explained by any note in the pro- gramme—was that the whole concert was confined to works written between 1892 and
1905, a period before Sibelius had reached full maturity. The first symphony and the violin concerto are not only full of remini- scences of Tchaikovsky ; neither has the unmistakable Sibelius atmosphere of power- ful bleakness, though both can show a liberal dose of the composer's typical weak- nesses. En Saga, the third work in the pro- gramme, had a better claim to inclusion, as Sibelitis's earliest published score and a masterpiece of its kind. But surely a pro- gramme -of early, middle and late works would have been a more fitting birthday tribute to the composer. Performances were good, especially of the symphony ; but the choice of the charmingly lyrical but rather small-toned Ida Haendel as soloist in the concerto was not very happy.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra's concert on December 9th was conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, who was perhaps also responsible for the unfamiliar ending to Mozart's Seraglio overture, a rumbustious combination of themes hardly in accordance with Mozart's age or character. Racine Fricker's viola concerto, which was given earlier in the year at Edinburgh, was played by William Primrose, who commissioned it. This is a comparatively light-hearted, light- weight work, which shows Fricker's power of writing in a delicate, chamber-music style for the orchestra and his nice sense of tonal contrast—between soloist and orchestra and between small combinations within the orchestra and the tutti, which were the more effective for being used sparingly. The finale contains episodes that are as nearly good-humoured as anything that Fricker has written recently, but he remains a tem- peramentally serious and " tough " com- poser. Neither here nor in Harold in Italy was the soloist quite up to his finest form. In the Fricker work his intonation was not always above question and he brought less than his finest, fullest tone to Harold. Samuel Barber's first symphony opens with a most promising first movement, traditional in tonality and lay-out but com- posed of excellent material used with academic skill and the infectious vigour and enthusiasm common—though by no means universal—in early works. The . scherzo, too, has plenty to say for itself. But in the slow movement and the final passacaglia the quality of the music deteriorates. The material is fundamentally commonplace and its rather showy presentation reveals a streak of coarseness in the composer's musical make-up.
After more than thirty years the music of Prokofiev's first opera, Love for Three Oranges, has reached this country via the Third Programme. Gozzi's fantastic fairy- tale may well be charming and full of point in a stage presentation ; but even Dennis Arundell's experienced production could not make it really intelligible over the air. The choruses and the host of minor charac- ters were difficult to relate to the main action, which itself seemed oddly pointless. Prokofiev's music, played by the Phil- harmonia Orchestra under Nicolai Malko, glittered and crackled but left the mere listener with not very much to carry away.
MARTIN COOPER
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