Words to Music

Neville Cardus A Musica/ Season Andrew Porter (Gollancz 14.00)

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lea Years ago Andrew Porter was invited to vee, 'London music criticism to go to New jantk, there to write about concerts and opera United States. His departure left a ning chasm in the serried ranks of his nd

on colleagues, bending low and acaderni

a-"Y over their scores in the Royal Festival Hall hnid elsewhere, Mr Porter has collected many of I,: reviews that have appeared in the New „'rker since 1972, to make this three-hundredPage book.

a modest preface, Mr Porter hopes that his crew Yorker reviews "can survive an Atlantic sing," Frankly, and with sorrow I say it, Y. of them have not exactly left the ground ai [New York. Interesting, no doubt, the pr°erinng or week after the event to audiences , sent at the music-making described, too read of these reprints are likely to seem. to pr,,,„ers in this country as so much routine

-essional reportage. kn.

thow thow e , -mg well that Andrew Porter is one of

living music-critics who really cah

an-tb`e', can write so well that he could go into an for-nLogy of current English prose, collected havdistinguished prose's sake; knowing this, I book e Patiently traversed a desert of pages in his epo, certain that sooner or later I would come abon an oasis. Sure enough, I did, a passage El IA Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: thth Schwarzkopf is, of all Lieder singers before qf today, the most accomplished. For her use rritisteLcis she is famous, but any analysis of her art founduegin with her control of line. This line is to be Bach, at its purest in her account of such a song as thro 8 .81st du bei mir'. A single, quiet emotion shines Acmligh the piece; there is no dramatic content, no gen—iti to vvary the vocal tints. The words must be said pica'sisitnply, and clearly, placed without strong nsti.S along a smooth melody that is a most elc,4"inental in character. This Miss Schwarzkopf With • • • Miss Schwarzkopfs first Wolf group closed Geliebter' . . . marvellous piece, coin slia,"ed of passion and pudeur, sensuality and 'ghte,.evoking a scene of rumpled bedclothes, dawn arid trilercing the shutters, stir in the streets below, illi • e si love.nger's mingled guiltiness and glory in her elt Ther tie, I think, you have a superbly imaginathe "escription of one of Wolf's greatest songs, soo Most beautifully and throbbingly erotic rile!! in existence. Mr Porter conjures up, for

anY rate, the scene, the passion, and the Ic's suggestions of the approach of the inimical day, as the lover departs. Fully to interpret this song, 'Geh, Geliebter', not only is a voice needed, but the mingled blood and temperament of a Cleopatra, an Isolde, and a Carmen. But Schwarzkopf and Porter get to the beating heart of the matter.

I have, in a long lifetime serving as music critic, repeatedly wondered why so many of my learned colleagues write with so much stress on details of performance. Only readers who happen to hear the concert under notice are likely to be curious about the critic's valuation of a performance unless it is related to a sensitive understanding of the music performed.

When I, like Mr Porter, was invited to write

about music overseas On my case, for the Sydney Morning Herald), I was dismayed that the first concert I had to attend, as critic, presented a programme of well-known overplayed works the 'Oberon' overture of Weber, the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, and so on. Naturally I wanted to make my first appearance as critic, on the staff of Australia's most respected paper, at least notable for some interesting writing. But, I thought, how on earth could I say anything not stale and boring about so much hackneyed music. I had not been sitting at the concert ten minutes before I realised that the audience was listening intently, listening to the music with unstaled critics.

Then I remembered there are no hackneyed masterpieces; only hackneyed So I wrote a column about the music as

though hearing it through the ears of an audience not necessarily too sophisticated. Also I tried to get into my notice a twinkle of Wit here and there. There is a plentiful lack of Wit in all kinds of criticism nowadays. Where are the Max Beerbohms, the Shaws, the Agates, sthheaw, D, writing the Newmans? Here is

about Arbos "Arbos, the

Spanish violinist, introduced to us by Albdniz, has made no deep impression on London so far. At his first concert he tried over the Kreutzer Sonata, and did not seem to think much of it, though here and there a passage evidently struck him as rather good ..." It was Shaw who dismissed Hubert Parry's oratorio Job with the comment "only Job could have had the wtohe a re concert ncgert uaritnetthbey Apatience to listen to it." Ernest Newman went

Wigrnore Hall, London, lgernon Ashton was played. Ashton, a professor at the Royal College of Music, was a compulsive composer,

spawning symphonies, concertos, chamber music. Newman wrote acidly of Ashton's quartet at this Wigmore Hall concert; then, half-way through his notice, he relented, saying "but we must not be too hard on this quartet because,

judging early work...0y. number 289, _ obviously a I found that I could persuade even non-mu

sical Australians to plough through my musical reviews if I could occasionally make them smile. At a Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert, the principal of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music conducted the first performance of a symphony composed entirely by himself. It was not exactly original, echoing Elgar and Vaughan Williams; but it had its good points, so I praised the work on the whole but, I added, if at another performance the composer again conducts, "maybe he will do fuller justice to the symphony after he has become thoroughly acquainted with the score ..."

Music critics, and critics in the lump, need

not take themselves so seriously; they are not sentencing anybody to death. A few smiles would have enlivened Mr Porter's pages. The Americans are not without humour when it comes to listening to music. It was a Chicago impresario who said, "Good music isn't nearly so bad as it sounds."

Sir Neville Cardus has been a distinguished writer on cricket and music for many years