MUSIC
Some Contemporary MUSIC
THE last of Messrs. Boosey and Hawkes's concerts of contemporary music contained only one new work, a concertino for nine instru- ments, wind and strings by Elisabeth Lutyens. Miss Lutyens is twaing if not concise, but I cannot think that the combination of instru- ments, which included trumpet and trombone, was happily judged ; this music with its continuous dissonance, pointellist use of colour and jagged rhythms inhabits a world of which the language, not to speak of the ideas, is so remote from the normal as to he frankly un- intelligible. It would, therefore, be pointless to complain that Miss Lutyens does not achieve the lush kind of beauty that Bax creates, with a harp instead of a trombone, in his Nonet, playe.1 earlier in the programme.
This concert included three pieces by Bliss originally produced in 1920. Rout was an experiment in using the soprano voice as an instrument equal with wind, strings and drums, and not as the vehicle of words. The experiment failed because for one thing the voice cannot be dissociated in our minds from the expression of intelligible ideas and we try to make out what the singer's gibberish means, and, still more, because the sudden fortissimo outbursts dis- sociated from verbal sense inevitably sound like cries of pain or alarm—which are quite alien to this representation of revelry. The Rhapsody for two voices, wind and strings is more successful because it is purely lyrical and the wordless vocalise makes use only of vowel-sounds. Nevertheless, despite its failure as an experiment, Rout has enough inner vitality to be worth reviving. This concert was conducted by Mr. Constant Lambert.
Earlier in the week I attended at Trinity College of Music one of the concerts given under the august patronage of their elders by the young and unknown. There were three works, of which a set of Variations and Fugue by Bernard Stevens was the most accom- plished. A fault was that the theme itself was insufficiently memor- able to impress distinctive features upon the listener recognisable in subsequent transformations. But the work showed considerable invention and the fugue did not peter out after the second or third entry. Malcolm Arnold's Wind Quintet was full of high spirits, drawing upon all manner of popular and exotic styles. But for all its eclecticism it had too little variety of mood. DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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