MUSIC
Edinburgh. THE Floral Clock in Princes Street Gardens has joined the cultural fashion of the hour, and round its dial are planted and blossoming the names of four great composers—Haydn, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Elgar. I think the spacing must have something to do with the choice of names ; but even so, given thirty letters, I feel I could have made a happier selection. That is a mere detail, though, and it is ungracious to start with a cavil. The Festival opened on Sunday afternoon with a solemn inaugural service in St. Giles, enlivened with all the civic pomp and circum- stance imaginable. The choir of purple-robed men and women (no boys) sang very well—Vaughan Williams's Te Deum and Parry's " I was glad when they said unto me " (which seemed to me a weak and rhetorical work). In the evening the Colonne Orchestra, conducted by Paul Paray, gave a symphony concert in the Usher Hall—Haydn's Surprise, Schumann's D Minor and the Cesar Franck The Haydn was no more than average good, certainly compared with Sir Thomas Beecham's Haydn, which we have got accustomed to taking far too much for granted. The Schumann, on the other hand, was a revelation. No one would claim that it is perfect as a symphony—it has, so to speak, two last movements and no first— but what wonderful music even to! The string tone of the Colonne was exactly right, its warm, intensely dramatic heaviness alternating with the wistful and lyrical moods of which M. Paray was luckily quite unafraid. The D Minor Symphony is not one of Schumann's moodiest works ; it is too predominantly heroic in tone for that ; but, even so, the contrasts are vivid and need very careful managing, and M. Paray obviously has the music at his finger-tips. The Franck symphony was a poor choice. I felt, and there was an occasional
note of perfunctoriness in the performance. The first movement must, after all, be taken au grand serieux and the middle movement needs a loving hand to make the most of its two blends of poetry.
On Monday the Glyndebourne Opera gave Verdi's Macbeth at the King's Theatre. I don't think anyone who saw Margherita Grandi as Tosca at the Cambridge Theatre—a good, but not an outstanding performance—would have guessed what a magnificent Lady Macbeth she would make. She is helped by a superb figure and carriage, and there was a really regal quality about her singing as well as her movements. (A slightly unfortunate moment m the sleep-walking scene, when she suddenly halfatottered down the stairs, must he blamed on the producer, I think.) Francesco Valentino was a well-matched Macbeth. Smaller in stature and in vocal power, with a more lyrical voice, he was the embodiment of irresolution, and it was not hard to believe—as it is in some performances of Macbeth—that Banquo (Italo Tajo) was the bigger man and that his children would indeed reign. Carl Ebert's production erred on the side of fussiness. There seemed to be too many ideas, and in all the witches' scenes I found the grotesqueness overdone : they were monsters, not hags whom one could even for a moment mistake for women. On the other hand, the big choral scenes were beauti- fully managed—very stylised and deliberate ; but that was essential on a comparatively small stage. The last scene in Act 2 (the lament over Duncan) and the first in Act 4 (the Scottish exiles lamenting the fate of their country) were two of the great moments of the
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