Contemporary Arts
MUSIC
SINCE his appointnnent as Musical Director of Morley College in succession to Michael Tippctt some years ago, Peter Fricker has changed the character of its activities and extended the range of his own. Even more now than before it is a centre of contemporary music, and an active if friendly rival to the music section of the ICA. The big public choral and orchestral concerts have been abandoned for more modest but less expensive and more froquent concerts of chamber and chamber-orchestral music, in which Fricker has shown increasing skill as a conductor. One of his main interests recently has been the development of a considerable wind ensemble, with which lie has performed several works whose demand for big wind combinations difficult to assemble keeps them out of the concert hall--notably Stravinsky's Mass, which he has given.not only in concert form but also liturgically, at St. Thomas's Church, Regent Street, in nhe Sunday morning service last week, and the same composer's Piano Con- certo, which recently attracted many profes- sional musicians who had never had an oppor- tunity to hear it in its thirty years of existence.
His cultivation both of Stravinsky and of wind music is symptomatic of a general revival of interest in the music of the post-war decade to which, the Stravinsky concerto belongs. It was the period of neo-classicism, when com- posers, bed by Stravinsky, were trying to restore music's emotional and formal balance after a phase of almost undisciplined expressionism. For this they found wind instruments ideal, since t hey helped to impose upon them the discipliIne that they sought to impose on them- selves. Their timbre in ensemble lacks any capacity for that intense emotional expressive- ness to which the tone of a body of strings conduces and almost unavoidably tends, and also deprives the composer, by its relative lack of tonal coherence, of the effective use of complax modern harmony, and consequently of many of the ready-made sombrely intense chords that are so dangerously useful in piano or string music. He is therefore compelled to write 'a more urbane, less emotional and tonally brighter music that seeks tonal coher- ence aind euphony either in simple consonant harmony or in the adroit spacing of dis- sonar! ces so far apart that their emotional intercity is greatly reduced, and that makes its emotonal appeal by purely musical means, withwut ready 'expressive' effects—by its formal (formal in the most comprehensive sense of the word) beauty and originality.
Now, after being discredited for twenty-five yearn, the ideals of neo-classicism are being takefn up again as it is realised that the reaction front them was premature and has led only to a elapse into neo-romantic emotionalism (seCking to make itself respectable in un- oriuinal symphonic forms) from which music hat, now to recover all over again. Stravinsky hiniself, the pioneer of the original movement anfd supreme master of its style and technique, is now in his old age showing how it can be reconciled with the other main influence in post-war music, serial composition, which was always considered the expressionist technique gar excellence—not quite justly, since its inventor Schoenberg first used it in his own neo-classical works of the original phase thirty years ago, a suite for piano and, significantly, a wind quintet.
The influence of Stravinsky has not yet reached Fricker's own music, although his interest in wind instruments is not new. One of his earliest works was a wind quintet, played recently at one of the South Place chamber concerts. But in this he evades any real esthetic problem in the first two movements, by drop- ping into the facetiousness that is the only alternative, and in the last two fails to find a satisfactory solution. Now he has written a sonata for horn and piano, which was given its first performance at the same concert. This goes to the opposite extreme of seriousness. The demands of a solo wind instrument, especially the horn, with its wide expressive range, are different from those of an ensemble, and the darkly lyrical first movement is legitimate. But the middle scherzo, although animated, lacks the contrasting brightness that the ear needs, and the rhetorically solemn last movement, cryptically entitled 'Invocation' is not as apt for its function as some of Fricker's other unusual finales, and not quite musically satisfying. Nor is the technical problem well solved. The writing for the two instruments does not blend into a unified texture, and the piano part lacks sufficient weight for the horn (although this effect may have been due in part to Harry Isaacs's seemingly indecisive per- formance of it). Stravinsky has not touched this work either, in technique or style. It would almost certainly have been better if he had. and Fricker's present absorption in his wind music suggests that he may be aware of that. and be consciously trying to learn from him how to strike the balance between the emotional extremes of these tWb works of his own that his music in general—not only that for wind instruments—and with it most other modern music needs. Having already absorbed the strong influence of Bartok well into his music, and taken a more nervous but per- sistent interest in Schoenberg, he cannot be overwhelmed by the impact of this neo- classical Stravinsky, and can only benefit by it. May its results soon show.
COLIN MASON
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