MUSIC IT was presumably the imp of the perverse—not a
fairy forgotten at Sir Thomas Beecham's christening-party—who prompted his revival of Balfe's Bohemian Girl at Covent Garden. Balfe's connection with the Great Exhibition of 1851 is tenuous, almost as tenuous as the interest of the music compared with that of dozens of operas with which Sir Thomas might have surprised and dazzled the large and heterogeneous audience which he can depend on attracting. The plot is a cento of incidents familiar to opera-lovers from their use in Trovatore and a host of minor Ruritanian operas and operettas. The music would seem even less original if Auber were not almbst unknown, and probably suggested very diluted early Verdi to 'most listeners.
Balfe was an efficient theatrical musician—like a great Many French and Italian composers of his day—and his melodies have a certain narrow-chested charm. They never expand, and their range of mood is small, because Balfe seems unwilling or unable to modu,, late, and his rhythms are weak and conventional. With difficulty and reluctance Balk moves from the tonic to the dominant, and on the return journey the only diversification of the scenery is pro- vided by the ornamental close—a gaily beflagged station at the end of a pretty tame outing. The period flavour of the ensembles, enhanced by the fatuity of the libretto, was amusing for a short time, but it was a joke that very soon palled.
It was clear from the overture that Sir Thomas Beecham had expended all his energy, skill and imagination on this production; and this, perhaps unreasonably, aggravated my own sense of irrita- tion, which was, I fancy, fairly general. To what purpose was this waste? In a year when Italy is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Verdi's death by performances of many of his lesser and lesser- known operas, must England be content to disinter a third-rate work whose only claim on our interest lies in the nationality of the com- poser (which in any case would be hotly disputed with Eire) ? Could not Sir Thomas have given us, for instance, Luisa Miller, or Ernani ? If we are anxious to disinter Balfe's music, is not the happiest way to make a ballet, with the right period flavour, out of his best operatic music ? His musical stature, and even character, are similar to those of Charles Adam, the composer of Giselle and a contemporary ; and both Meyerbeer and Lecocq have lent their operatic music to make successful ballets.
However, the Covent Garden performance was admirable in itself. The orchestra played with great eloquence and dash, and the singers, both familiar and unfamiliar, often went a long way to making Balfe's unadventurous music palatable. Of the familiar, Jess. Walters excelled himself as the padre nobile, and his singing of the aria in the court-house scene was the most distinguished thing I have ever heard him do and one of the high lights of the evening. Howell Glynne, too, made a suitably rumbustious Devilshoof, and Edith Coates gave an amusing parody of herself as the Queen of the Gipsies. Arline, the heroine with the Hollywood name, was sung with considerable distinction by Roberta Peters, a young American soprano with a light, cool voice and a good sense of line ; but Anthony Marlowe, as Thaddeus, was too uncertain in both style and intonation to make a convincing hero. Dennis Arundell's pro- duction combined' a sense of period with lively imagination, and the Pressburg (or should we not say Bratislava ?) Fair was a model of crowd-management on a big stage.
* At the Proms. Hindemith's clarinet concerto was admirably played by Frederick Thurston with the L.S.O. under Basil Cameron. The first movement showed us the dry', efficient side of Hindemith, who can turn out a reputable orchestral movement with as much ease and as little emotional interest as the rest of us type a sheet of foolscap. A more distinctive and winning scherzo followed, and in the slow movement the composer showed the invention, the warmth and the instrumental sense which characterise his best work. The orchestral background to Frederick Thurston's finely-modulated melody was rich in charming and characteristic figures (the bird-call on the muted trumpet chief among them), and the brisk, businesslike finale was something of a disappointment after such a delightful
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