MUSIC.
113.1, PROMENADE CONCERTS.
No country in the world has a better annual series of concerts than the Promenade Concerts which have been resumed at the Queen's Hail. Not only are the " Proms " a financial success in a country where orchestral music usually means financial ruin; they are a - financial success in a country whose apathy towards music is proverbial. This result they achieve without any soul-destroying concessions to public taste—indeed, on at least one night in each week the unvarying austerity of the programmes seems rather a bait to catch the idealist, and he, as all concert promoters know, is too rare a bird to be worth catching. People complain that the Promenade Concerts are not progressive, but that is not their function. They exist to give Londoners good music at a low price. Even so, a commendable number of new works, foreign and British, are insinuated—this best describes the process—into each season's programmes. Therefore it is with no small pride that the lover of music scans the yearly prospectus. First, I habitually look at the Saturday pro- grammes—the notorious " popular " nights, the anathema of all musical high-thinkers, yet the joy of half Cockaigne. On Saturdays the Queen's Hall is " stiff " with people. They may be separated into three broadly defined groups—the young man with his girl, who go because they must go somewhere ; the unmusical man with his pipe, who goes because smoking is permitted; and the elderly lady, who played Mendelssohn when she was seventeen. A tepid mixture of Donizetti and Weber is usually served on Saturday nights, and for that reason they are called " popular," but actually they are some- thing far more diabolical than that. The thin, sweet gruel of the programmes is seasoned with more solid things—Ballets of Gluck and Rameau, Symphonic Poems (both Psyche and Le Chasseur Maudit) of Cesar Franck, works by Glinka, Berlioz, and J. B. McEwen, and on one Saturday (October 21st) we find Dr. Vaughan Williams's Wasps overture, Debussy's L' Apres- midi d'un Panne, Moussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition, and Cesar Franck's Symphonic Variations towering over a solitary Sibelius. Cockaigne is bribed to these Saturday nights by hope of music with a small " m " and is confronted, in a very skilful, unalarming way, by Music with a large " M." Gradually Music casts her spell over the Saturday nighter, and in time he joins the nobler minority of Tuesdayites and Wednesdayites. Finally, he breathes on Fridays the rare atmosphere of Bach and Beethoven. This is no imaginary process—though its workings are imperceptible and spread over long years of musical depravity, because Music can, and does, offer the ordinary man immensely greater delight while making only slightly greater demands on him than does music.
Monday, as everyone knows, is devoted entirely to Wagner. Whatever dark opinions we may have of Wagner, it remains a fact that he alone can draw a full audience once every week in the season. That in itself is a flattering testimony. It would be quite possible and wholly delightful to have Mozart nights, Beethoven nights, Moussorgsky nights, and, indeed, it would be just tolerable to have Brahms nights, but they could not continue with the monotonous regularity and the hectic success of the Wagner nights. This season the Wagner nights are each devoted to one opera only—the result, no doubt, of the successful Valkyrie night last year. Selections from Tann- &Riser may be heard on August 21st, The Meistersingers on August 28th, Lohengrin on September 4th, Tristan and Isokle on September 11th, Parsifal on September 18th, Rheingold on September 25th, The Valkyrie on October 2nd, Siegfried on October 9th, and Gotterdeimmerung on October 16th. From Tristan onwards, the prelude and one or two acts, or at least several scenes, are performed in their entirety. The parts are taken by well-known opera-singers, and the result should be wholly gratifying. Wagner can be heard to advantage in extracts, and until the standard of operatic decor is improved this may well be the best way of hearing Wagnerian opera. Certainly a _Siegfried in a " boiled " shirt fighting an imaginary dragon in an atmosphere that is musically congenial to imagina- tion is better than the ludicrous pantomime of Covent Garden, when the entire decor rises and shrieks in contradiction to the music. On Monday evening I found myself wishing that the same generous hand which had drawn up the rest of the Wagner programmes had given us more of The Flying Dutchman
than was then performed. Few Londoners attended the per.. formances given two or three years ago in a little theatre in Southwark by the Fairfax-Milne Opera Company, and, failing the reappearance of that brave little venture, few Londoners are likely to have another chance of hearing it. Yet The Flying Dutchman, in spite of its obvious faults, is an extremely interesting and delightful work, and certainly more worthy of performance than the perennial Cavalleria Busticana, as one sees it in every opera advertisement.
It is pleasant to know that a number of British works have been added to the Promenade repertory. We used to complain in the past that British composers received only the cold shoulder, but then, who does not remember ? there was a chill as of death in their very works. The few that wrote Music then had their works performed. More interesting than the novelties even are these additions to the repertory. They include such works of undoubted merit as Mr. Eugene Goossens's Four Conceits (August 23rd), Mr. Arnold Bax's November Woods (September 6th), the Ballet from Mr. Gustav Hoist's Opera The Perfect Fool (September 21st), Mr. John Ireland's Symphonic Rhapsody (September 27th), and Mr. Frank Bridge's Summer (October 18th).
The Overture to Bronwen, reviewed in these columns a year ago, the last of Mr. Josef llolbrooke's operatic trilogy, The Cauldron of Anwyn, will be played on August 22nd. Many of us have felt that Mr. Holbrooke had said his last, but the Bronwen Overture is an exception. The thematic material is concise, its development is sound, which is saying much for Mr. Holbrooke, and the overture works up to a splendidly convincing climax. Though announced for performance early in the year, at one of Mr. Goossens's concerts, the overture was not then performed. On the Continent it has had some success, and its first performance here can be looked forward to with interest. A miniature score (2s. 6d. net) has been published by Messrs. Goodwin and Tabb, 34 Percy Street, W. 1, and it will certainly help any who propose to brave this, by no means the most terrifying of Mr. liolbrooke'a compositions.
The " Proms " are an inexhaustible subject; the main thing is that they continue as healthily as ever.
C. H.
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