MUSIC
THE Three Choirs Festival at Worcester followed a normal and largely uneventful course. It is fundamentally a regional festival, a celebration of the quite remarkable musical powers of composers born in the Severn country during the last hundred years. Edward Elgar, Julius Harrison, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells would represent a most distinguished quartet of musicians in any age and any country ; and in a comparatively remote corner of an England only just waking from its century-long torpor they have assumed the appearance of genii loci—which is much more than to say local geniuses.
Elgar and Vaughan Williams are secure in the public appreciation and enjoy the same sort of healthily informed veneration (though most people naturally go to the Three Choirs Festival to venerate and not to criticise) as was enjoyed by the gods of Olympus, a knowledge of whose limitations and even misdemeanours incre'ased rather than diminished their worshippers' devotion. With the other two composers of the quartet the case is different. Julius Harrison's Mass in C is a very much less personal, less telling work than his Worcestershire Suite, arousing frigid admiration at most where the Suite immediately charms. Harrison—like Tchaikovsky and, some would say, Elgar—seems to be a composer most original- in his lighter moments, and ill-suited by the heavier bardic robes which it is the ambition of all-composers to wear before they die. Howells, perhaps the most naturally gifted of all four composers, had not appeared before the general public.with a large new work for many years when his Hymnus Paradisi was given its first performance at Gloucester last year. The impression it then made was of a deeply cultivated personality expressing its reflections on the Four Last Things in a language both natural and highly polished, yet lacking the strongly personal turn of phrase, the cutting or anguished expres- siveness which we have come to demand of a composer who treats such a subject.
At a first hearing I was more aware of the absence of this striking quality than of the positive virtues of the masic—its controlled dramatic power, its variety, and the atmosphere of noble resignation which here and there recalls that of Faure's Requiem. These virtues struck me forcibly at-Worcester, where Hymnus Paradisi was to me unquestionably the greatest musical experience of the festival. Pos- sibly the performance was better than at Gloucester last year ; but more probably this is music whose superficial conventionality is misleading and conceals durable qualities which only reveal them- selves on repeated hearing.
At the Proms. there haVe been " first performances in this country" of a symphonic suite by Alan Bush and a Scherzo Fantasque by Bloch. It was easy, and perhaps wiser, to disregard the program- matic suggestions for the three movements of Bush's Piers Plowman's Day. The chunky brass figures and dramatic antitheses of the first movement were suffiCient to hold the listener's interest unaided by visions of declining feudal barons ; and the mediaeval hints in the Middle movement—viol-like string writing, troubadour snatches and
refined miniature technique in general—did not need the "lady's bower" as background. Nor did the rising peasants in the last movement rescue the music from declining into a picturesque shape- lessness. But the music as a whole, while showing none of the formidable intellectual power of the composer's Dialectic, was neat, apt and well-written. Bloch's Scherzo had none of these qualities. It was a blowzy, noisy piece in the late-romantic manner, whose bazaar-like orchestration killed the solo piano part in spite of Iris Loveridge's gallant and efficient attempts to rescue it.
MARTIN COOPER.
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