MUSIC
THE Glyndebourne Opera's performance of Cosi fan Tuue at Edin- burgh was a triumphant success. It is difficult to compare it mentally with last year's, but I had the impression that it was an improvement, not necessarily in the individual voices but in the musical and dramatic whole. Suzanne Danco again sang Fiordiligi, with that rare and excellent combination of intelligence and charm, fine voice and technical fluency, which distinguish all her perform- ances. Sena Jurinac's Dorabella both matched in weight and contrasted in colour as Dorabella should, and as a pair of sisters they could hardly have been bettered. Petre Munteanu, who sang Ferrando last year, was again rather less than Mozartean in his solo numbers, where what appeared to be nervousness spoiled the phrasing and perfect control of his voice. Marko Rothmiiller, whose voice and stage personality do not lend themselves to a comic part, made a droll and slightly incongruous Guglielmo, and an occasional unyielding, wooden quality of his voice was noticeable in the con- certed numbers ; but his musical intelligence and the natural dramatic quality of his voice made up for what was, perhaps, a fault of casting. John Brownlee was a much less florid, less ripely extrovert Don Alfonso than Mariano Stabile last year, but unfailingly efficient—if anything more respectful of Mozart's style though less obviously enchanted by it. Irene Eisinger was very difficult to hear and neither her singing, nor her acting had the necessary verve for Despina. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vittorio Gui never allowed their playing for a moment to become perfunctory, but preserved the sparkle and vitality unfailingly throughout the whole of what is a long and most demanding score. Carl Ebert's production was extremely well finished without being finicky. I heard the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra play both under Sit John Barbirolli and Eugene Goossens. They are a heavy-weight combination and would have done better to avoid Rossini's Semircanide overture (which, like champagne and fireworks, must never have a hint of flatness or damp) and the Gallic "fine writing" (with purple patches a la Russe) of Dukas' La Peri. Hindemith's Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber, a brilliant class-room demon- stration of technical processes, they played with the skill it demands and Mahler's first symphony found them on something like con- genial ground. What a " monstr'-inform'-ingens-horrendous " of windy rhetoric is the last movement of that work! In the first two movements Mahler is at his most naive and in the second he produces an effective genre-piece, the funeral march of a musical marionette. But by the time that he has reached his finale ideas have run out and he has only a vague emotional mood and orchestral skill with which to construct his climax. He inflates, sidetracks (in a song-incident palpitating with Webschmerz) and repeats himself in increasingly louder tone of voice until the listener is beside himself with boredom and accepts the brass instruments rising to their feet in a final paroxysm as something like an item of gossip which suddenly attracts his attention in a provincial newspaper. Was there not once a slogan "Keep it short, keep it sweet, keep it snappy " ? If so, it should have been Mahkr's motto.
I wish Aulikki Rautawara had sung something else besides the songs of Sibelius at the Freemasons' Hall. She wasted' a fine voice and considerable powers of interpretation on a programme which might have been designed to demonstrate the decadence of the German Romantic movement and the repercussions of the tradition of the nineteenth century German Lied among the minor composers of the Scandinavian countries. For as a song-writer nobody could
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