CONTEMPORARY ARTS
MUSIC -
THIS last week we have had two of the great masterpieces of the eighteenth century, Bath's St. Matthew Passion and Mozart's Magic Flute, the one dating from the beginning of the century and the other from the very end ; so that the seventeenth century is still present in Bath and the nineteenth already budding in Mozart.
The Bach Choir sang the Passion with Dr. Jacques and his orchestra on March 23rd. It was a good all-round performance without being in any way superlative. Eric Greene's singing of the Narrator's music is beautifully polished and a perfect expression of his conception of the music. But I feel sure that his conception is not right, and that he—in places grossly—over-dramatises the part, which is nearly all narrative and not lyrical, except where Bach makes it perfectly clear: and even then dramatic, almost stagy, diminuendo and flu di voce effects are quite out of place. Elsie Suddaby errs if anything on the other side. The arias are the lyrical expressions of the pious—and often painfully Pietistic—souls standing back from the story and meditating ; and the intensely subjective and emotional quality of Lutheran piety demands corre- sponding warmth of voice. Kathleen Ferrier found exactly the right mood and manner. This specifically eighteenth-century and Lutheran quality of the arias—expressed, for example, in the frequent apostrophising of " my Jesus " and such phrases as " Jesu's bosom "—is in strong contrast .with the nakedness of the Evangelist's recitative and the solid mass of the choruses and chorals. Rococo ornamentation corresponds to the gushing emotion of the arias, and emotion of any kind should therefore be excluded in general from the recitative. The modern organ is, I feel, completely out of place in the Passion, no less and no more than a grand pianoforte would be for the continuo. Whenever it enters, the lines are blurred, the voices inaudible (the narration of the rending of the veil of the temple was a case in point) and a purely modern, emotional "effect " is introduced.
The Magic Flute is a much happier production at Covent Garden than Carmen or Manon. It is a fantastic work (which always suits the English and found beautiful expression in Oliver Messel's sets, though his dresses sometimes overreached themselves) and demands no great sense of style. Every generation interprets the story differently. The Masonic mumbo-jumbo, the priggish talk of Virtues with Capital Letters and the general atmosphere of what was later to be called Higher Thought, leaves me personally quite cold, and only Mozart's music could persuade me to sit through a pantomime with a moral. The choruses and what might be called the semi-choruses—the Three Ladies, the Three Boys and the Two Armed Men—were all excellent. Kenneth Neate made a good Pamino, though he seemed to flag a little towards the end, and Victoria Sladen a passable, though rather colourless, Pamina ; Oscar Natzka was not nearly portentous or big-voiced enough as Sarastro, and failed to impress even with Oliver Messel's vestments. Audrey Bowman managed the Queen of the Night's music, but seemed too precarious vocally as well as geographically. Graham Clifford gave Papapageno a broad Irish brogue, not in itself a bad idea (Schikaneder may easily have played the part with a Tyrolese or Bavarian accent), but his voice was a little too reminiscent of the
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