MUSIC
ON Tuesday the Chelsea Symphony Orchestra gave what is probably their last concert for the time being, owing to the usual financial difficulties. They have a fine record of rare works to their credit and their concerts have attracted the musically curious, the amateurs of the unfashionable which is, alas! also the uneconomic. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see a reflection of a conductor's musical taste in his physical appearance (though Sir Thomas Beecham looks Haydn and Mozart rather than Delius) and Norman del Mar has shown in these concerts an inclination for music cast in his own generous, un-austere mould. Thus Bruckner, Busoni, Mahler, Strauss and Rachmaninov have all been well represented ; and if the very over-resonant Chelsea Town Hall has sometimes been filled with a truly pentecostal volume (and variety) of sounds, this has not come amiss to listeners starved of any close contact with music by the re-bombinating distances of the Albert Hall. This last concert was devoted to the juvenile works of Berlioz, Debussy, Stravinsky and Honegger, music of historical rather than intrinsic interest and often showing the huge gap which separates the initial esse from the ultimate posse of even the most distin- guished composers. The Francs Juges overture, his first orchestral work, in many ways resembles a malicious parody of Berlioz's mature style. His taste for the colossal is naively shown in sten- torian recitative passages for unison brass, the chief melody (which would disgrace a hack Italian opera of the 1830s) is repeated ad nauseam and inflated to vast dimensions of banality, the orchestration is often unsuccessfully experimental (the tympani in contrasting rhythm to the rest of the orchestra are only visible to the eye of the score-reader, not audible). Nevertheless the music is intensely personal, even at its worst, and there are moments (high violin tremolando with chromatic side-slips in the brass beneath) which already foretell Berlioz's mature style.
Stravinsky's symphony, written at 25, had hardly any of these prophetic moments. Imagine the young Elgar returned from a long holiday in Russia and an extensive study of Glazunov (Stravinsky's confessed model) and you have some idea of the heavy upholstery, the broad pathos and the academic mannerisms of the first move- ment. The scherzo is one of the innumerable offspring of Borodin's Polobstians (though here there was at least a hint of what Petrushka was to become only five years later) and the slow movement, modelled to the life from Tchaikovsky, revealed the nascent stylist in Stravinsky, already a brilliant photographer of other men's music but not yet the original portrait painter that he has shown himself in his later canvases of Tchaikovsky, Lully or Pergolese and in his various etchings in the jazz idioms.
Debussy's fantaisie for piano and orchestra, withdrawn by the
composer on the eve of its first performance and for his lifetime, adds nothing to our knowledge of the composer's charming but still quite indeterminate character in 1889. Honegger's 1924 con- certino shows the composer's most markedly French (and therefore least personal) characteristics. Honegger's earliest works revealed his deep affinity with the German classics and, although his fre- quenting of Les Six and his passing tribute to Parisian fashions resulted in a cleaning of his musical palette, he has never been at his best in the deliberately light-weight or frivolous style. On the same evening Georges Enesco conducted the Boyd Neel Orchestra in a performance of Casella's concerto for strings, piano and percussion, written in 1943. Like so much of Casella's work, this concerto proved the composer's technical dexterity, his sense of contrasted sonorities and his intelligent approach to musical prob- lems, but it inspired no conviction of his creative powers. MARTIN COOPER.
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