MUSIC
THE most interesting of the Proms so far has been the Bach-Hoist concert on July 27th. Ronald Smith played the F minor " piano " concerto quite exceptionally well, thanks to an unfailing rhythmic vitality which never degenerated into metronome-slogging in the fast movements and enabled him to play the ornamentations in the slow movement strictly within the beat instead of somewhere around it. Frederick Grinke and David Martin hardly had the smooth beauty of tone or the length of melodic line necessary for the wonderful slow movement of Bach's double violin concerto, but they played the rarely performed Holst with understanding and gusto.
Why is this work so seldom performed ? Too much has been made of its experimental nature. Neither Hoist's rhythmic devices nor his writing simultaneously in two keys are in themselves interest- ing ; and it is a measure of the provincialism of English music in 1930 that so much fuss should have been made about technical characteristics which were already commonplaces elsewhere. We have surely grown out of that naive state of mind by now, and can judge the music on its merits as music. Hoist's counterpoint should be judged in the same way ; there is no virtue in a canon as such, any more than in bitonality, and both may easily be used as gambits by fundamentally sterile composers with a taste for juggling with notes. Hoist on the other hand really has something to say, as always. The Lament of the double concerto, written largely for the two solo instruments unaccompanied, is an impressive example of his apparently abstract intellectualised style used in a genuinely expressive way. Hoist was temperamentally hostile to any form of emotional exhibitionism, so hostile that it may, if you will, be counted as a weakness ; but he was far from being cold-blooded. Since his death in 1934 we have become more accustomed to dryness and coolness of manner, and do not so easily confuse it with desicca- tion and frigidity of temperament. It is time that we were given more opportunities to revalue works like the double concerto and Egdon Heath and even the difficult Ode to Death.
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Vaughan Williams' Partita on July 29th proved pleasant enough, typical in many ways of the composer's later manner in which the oppressive earnestness and slow-motion quality of his earlier works have been replaced by an astringent humour and a greatly increased vital tempo. But Vaughan Williams is happier in the larger forms, and, though his string writing in the Partita is unexceptionable, it has not great distinction and the movement dedicated to Henry Hall was not successful either as a feu d'esprit or as a " straight " piece of music. The whole work, though certainly not detracting from the composer's reputation, will not add anything, I think.
The Grand Ballet de Monte Carlo opened at Covent Garden on August znd with Sebastian, a ballet in three scenes with story and music by Gian Carlo Menotti, whose two operas, The Medium and The Telephone, were recently given in London. In fact the story bore some resemblance to that of The Medium, though set in seventeenth-century Venice. George Skibine both danced and mimed magnificently in the title-role, and he, with Rosella Hightower and Andre Eglevsky (who have a magnificent technical display in Black Swan), will make a strong combination. The corps de ballet were very ragged (and unaccountably ill-groomed in appearance) in Constantia, an incredibly tedious and phoney dramatisation of Chopin's F minor piano concerto ; but they showed to much greater advantage in a more or less abstract ballet, Nair a Blanc, for which extremely original and beautiful music by Lalo (I suspect from
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