MUSIC
AT Covent Garden on June 25th Massine's latest addition to the symphonic ballet, of which he was the originator, was given with scenery and costumes by Christian Berard. After the more obvious choices of Berlioz and Tchaikovsky and the more doubtful Brahms and Beethoven, he has now attempted an altogether more difficult problem in Haydn. The " Clock " symphony is only connected with clocks by the tie-toe figure which dominates the slow move- ment, and considerable imagination was necessary to provide suitable incidents for three other musical movements—one before and two
after the appearance of the clock itself. I could not help feeling that I preferred the La Fontaine-Capek tradition of treating the insect world as an allegorical type of humanity to the arbitrary treatment of it by Massine, who seems to have been guided largely by the possibilities of stylising insects' appearances rather than by an interest in their various characters. Why, after all, have insects at all ? And, if so, why make a lizard come out of an apple which is the proper home (except in the very best orchards) of several pests but not of lizards ?
Both the story and a good deal of the dancing seemed to me over- complicated, a series of incidents elaborated for no other reason than that the classical symphony develops in its own good musical time, without many dramatic landmarks. The clock itself, a hand- some piece of chinoiserie, provided a play within the play, but surely its inhabitants should have been treated as stylised mechanisms, strongly contrasted with the sentient figures of the insect world ? Moira Shearer as the Princess rivalled Gilbert's House of Lords by doing nothing in particular and doing it very well, and the main role of the ballet was that of the clockmaker, danced efficiently by Alexander Grant. Perhaps pathos would have been out of place in Massine's fantasy, but to have allowed the single human being an altogether warmer and more emotional character and to have con- trasted that with the clockwork figures and the insects would have given more point to a rather limping story and avoided a certain superficiality which characterised the whole production.
* * * Sergiu C,elibidache conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Albert Hall on June 24th in a conventional programme. He is an irritating conductor to watch, but that is beside the point when the results are good. In Beethoven's eighth symphony they were
excellent; music was allowed to speak for itself and there was no hint of over-emphasis. The Tristan Prelude and Liebestod and Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Niel were more questionable. Beauty of tone and a real cantabile quality are obviously of the greatest importance to this conductor ; in fact there were several passages in the Tristan Prelude where his voice could be clearly heard urging the strings, by example rather than by precept, to sing more sweetly. What marred both the Wagner and the Tchaikovsky was a tendency so to concentrate on the beauty of tone and the moulding of each particular phrase that the flow of the whole piece (or section) suffered. A succession of beautifully phrased and exquisitely worded sentences does not make, by itself, a good paragraph or chapter ; and Celibidache's tendency to excessively slow tempi (already noticeable in the third movement of the Beethoven symphony) combined with this piecemeal treatment of the music to increase the tension and destroy the lyrical impulse of the Tristan Prelude.
MARTIN COOPER.
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