MUSIC
ON April 6th, in the small hall of Morley College, I received a revelation almost as unlikely as Solavyov's vision of Holy Wisdom in the British Museum Reading Room. " Ancient " Greek music, which I had regarded as irretrievably lost as a living art, came suddenly and vividly to life in the singing of Arda Mandikian. This Armenian girl, dressed in a peplum of light blue and girdled with gold, stood on the platform and sang a programme of Greek music which covered a range of twenty-one centuries. She sang two Delphic hymns from the second century B.C., unaccompanied of course, with closed eyes and folded hands and an expression of rapt ecstasy which had its perfect counterpart in her singing—warm, vibrant and dramatic but austere, passionate with the supernatural passion of the seer. The debated problem of pronunciation she solved by adopting that of the University of Athens, which seemed to give a slightly wider range of vowel-sounds than that of modern Demotic ; though in that I may be mistaken.
Has this singer solved the scholars' problem, which has always been how to sing the ancient fragments rather than what the notes were ? I imagine that jealousy alone will prompt some objections ; but to the musical ear these interpretations carried complete convic- tion. Some Byzantine church music, much more naïve in character though centuries later in date, was much nearer the familiar Gregorian plain-chant of the West. Finally in modern Greek folk-songs, and especially in the Klepht ballads, the Oriental influence of the Turkish occupation showed itself in the winding, melismatic ornamentation
and, 1 imagined, in the strident emotional climaxes, the almost hysterical cries of grief or triumph, whose full-blooded ferocity proved the singer's extraordinary versatility. This was magnificent dramatic singing, a temperament and a voice both rich and at the same time disciplined, and what seemed a sense of style which can only go with an acute musical intelligence.
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' Alan Rawsthorne's new piano sonatina, played by James Gibb at the Wigmore Hall on April 8th, provided what is in many ways an epitome of the composer's musical character. Its four movements contain the shrewd part-writing, the apparent lyrical nonchalance and the deliberately mysterious chasing over the keyboard that are familiar from the Bagatelles and the concerto. What seemed new to me was a certain ruthlessness, something like a truculence a la -Bartok, in the last movement. Rawsthorne has an unmistakable musical mind, an intelligence as well as a sensibility in the manipula- tion of sounds, which is never dormant even in his most lyrical pass- ages. This is the quality which always holds the listener's attention— this willed, deliberate order combined with the natural flow of feeling and ideas in which Rawsthorne has hardly a rival among his con- temporaries.
Inglis Gundry's Avon, at the Scala Theatre, lacks altogether this natural flow. His musical ideas, which are almost always instrumental rather than vocal, are increasingly submitted to processes of elabora- tion, thickened and twisted by the orchestra so that the singers have little opportunity. The libretto, also by the composer, deals with a rather confused story of love, politics and art in the Elizabethan age.
MARTIN COOPER.
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