MUSI C THE outstanding performances of the week have been the
Halle Orchestra's playing of three Mozart symphonies and Gieseking's of the first book of Debussy's Preludes, both at the Royal Festival Hall. It has been widely suggested that Sir John Barbirolli is a poet and a colourist of the orchestra but not an architect, and certainly he excels in obtaining glowing or brilliant instrumental colour, smooth surface and poetic atmosphere from his Manchester players. In each of the three symphonies—the E flat major, the G minor and the Jupiter—the slow movement gave unmixed pleasure, and the only possible questions were raised by the first or last movements. The G minor symphony, like Don Giovanni, has laid itself open to different interpretations. Schumann, and it seems Sir John Barbi- rolli, have taken it as the embodiment of grace and elegance with no ulterior significance ; but against them a school of thought arose in Germany to proclaim its tragic, " demonic" undercurrent of feeling, which was often in performance allowed to dominate the picture. It is only necessary to hear a performance dedicated to the extreme of either of these views to realise that neither party is in full possession of the truth. Just as anyone determined to represent Don Giovanni simply as a drama giocoso of the eighteenth century is met by the icy and inexorable music of the Commendatore, in which there is no hint of jocoseness, so the partisans of Grace Abounding in the G minor symphony are faced only a little less dramatically by the dark colouring of the first movement and the restless violence and deliberate pugnaciousness of much of the finale.
The Halle performance did seem to me a little too simply graceful, but that is a lesser fault than its opposite, the heavily tragic manner with exaggerated phrasing and a most rhetorical question in every innocent rest. As to the question of colour versus line, or painting versus architecture, in Sir John Barbirolli's conducting it would, I think, be fairest to emphasise the excellence of his painting rather than to belittle his sense of architecture.
When Gieseking plays Debussy he is an ageless magician, but when he played Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques it was difficult to believe that he is not as old as he looks. At fifty-seven he looks—and one might gather from his cultivation of a snow-white mane, wishes ha look—nearer seventy-five, and his playing of passages demanding a big volume of tone or great pace of execution often has that lack of control—a sudden splurge of tone or rhythmic lurch—which marks the playing of even the most distinguished ol`d. (I remember hearing Paderewski do exactly the same thing in the Etudes Sympho- niques twenty_years ago.) This involuntary febrility appeared very Occasionally—in Ce qu'a vu le vent del Fouest, for instance—in the Debussy preludes ; but in every other respect Gieseking's playing of these miniature poems was such as we are never likely to hear improved upon in our days. His secret is the all-pervasive cantabile tone, feather lightness of keyboard touch (though he can make the bells of the vanished cathedral boom) and an ability, even after a lifetime spent in playing this music, to preserve the illusion of improvising, by which Debussy himself set so much•store. No other pianist has so many gradations of piano tone at his command, and uho else could bring such natural, unaffected lyricism- and such perfect dynamic control to La Fille aux cheveux de lin ?\
MARTIN COOPER.
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