MUSIC
Hindemith and Bruckner.
THE Royal Philharmonic Society's concert at the Festival Hall on February 18th was conducted by the Hamburg conductor Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt. Visiting German conductors generally give us remarkably conventional programmes, but Mozart's symphony No. 39 in E flat and Beethoven's fifth are really too universally known to figure together in a Royal Philharmonic Society's programme, which we expect to contain something exceptionaL Hindemith's ballet-music for Nobilissima Visione was the only other work played, and was therefore lime-lit. The programme-note described Hinde- mith as a composer of the "atonalist" schoOl, which seems rather wide of the mark for a learned society, but admitted that this ballet-music was "not so difficult on the ear as some of his other works." That is certainly true, and Dr. Schmidt-Isserstedt, who conducted the first performance in 1938, gave the comparatively lightly written, yet still robust, score its full value—clean, clearly- drawn lines without much colour and, in the march, a hint of the humour which is not common in Hindemith's music. The two symphonies were excellently played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mozart a little Prussian but Beethoven truly heroic and masterful without bombast.
Eduard van Beinum is clearly determined that, if England finally refuses to accept Bruckner into the repertory, ignorance of his music shall be no excuse. At the Festival Hall on February 20th, Brahms's Tragic Overture and Alto Rhapsody were given somewhat per- functory readings, and then the London Philharmonic Orchestra and an audience in which the British element had noticeably diminished settled down to the seventy minutes of Bruckner No. 5. "Half idiot, half genius"—so Mahler characterised Bruckner ; and this symphony, by common consent not his best, showed both sides of his musical nature in glaring contrast. The faults certainly stand out more than life-size and seem often inconceivable. The monoto- nous, elephantine gait of every movement, the sudden abandonment of an idea and going off at a tangent, the working to death of what is often in itself admirable, the repeated false climaxes, whicfi earn Bruckner an undisputed palm as allumeuse among composers—all these faults which leap to the ear would be quite enough to put any lesser composer out of court. Bruckner survives, however.
It might be said that he is an aggregator rather than a composer of music; of composition in the painter's sense he seems to know nothing. It is by the quality of his ideas—what the Germans call Einfalle, as we might speak of a "windfall" of an idea—that Bruckner claims our attention. They are warm, great-hearted, visionary; they have no trace of pettiness, no second-hand quality. Whether Bruckner's music moves to the solemn liturgical gait of an ecclesi- astical procession or to the bucolic rhythms of Austrian country- dancing—the two worlds of his predilection—it remains always unmistakably his own and always the work of a man who speaks the language of music if clumsily yet with authority. He imposes himself; he. is never negligible nor trivial like Franck, whom he superficially resembles. He is not a tasteful composer; few of his stature are. He had not the uncertain taste of Franck or Mahler; he had no taste at all, only instinct. It is only necessary to compare Mahler's countrified episodes or movements with Bruckner's to see how Mahler's urban taste improved on Bruckner's genuinely bucolic instinct from a purely aesthetic point of view. Yet the younger composer learned from the older and only sophisticated what Bruckner had actually created. MARTIN COOPER.
Previous page
