MUSIC
THE standard of music in London during the Great Frost has been rather naturally below the average. Arctic concert-halls and a faint sprinkling of heavily-coated audience in a half-lit distance cannot be inspiring to performers who themselves have so freeze uncoated. The Boyd Neel Orchestra's concerts at Chelsea Town Hall on February 24th and March 3rd were notable exceptions. At the first the big six-part Ricercare from Bach's Musical Offering was the most interesting of the old works, while modern music was represented by Honegger's Symphony for Strings written in Paris during the German occupation. Certainly an atmosphere of frus- trated revolt and bitter lamentation fills the first two movements, though a thin red line of lyrical hope never disappears • and in the growing agitation and violence of the last movement, the feeling of expectation in the listener increases steadily until at the end of the work two trumpets, rising above the chaotic sea of the strings, sing out a chorale which is not simply defiance but, unmistakably, victory. This is programme music in the best—indeed the only legitimate—sense of the word. Honegger has expressed himself in purely musical language, confining his palette to the greys and browns of the string until the last movement and renouncing all external effects whatever. Those who have heard Prokofieff's Ode celebrating • the victory of the Allies will admire and respect Honegger the more.
The second of the Boyd Neel concerts was given in memory of Claire Crussard and the members of her Ars Rediviva ensemble who were killed •in an aeroplane disaster some weeks ago. Locatelli's Funeral Symphony was justified by the occasion rather than by its intrinsic merits, for it never rises much above the level of good average eighteenth-century music.. Royce's Symphony No. 4, on the other hand, must have been chosen as a favourite of Claire Crussard, for it is unashamedly light-hearted. Gerald Finzi's Dies Natalis, sung by Joan Gross with great understanding of its funda- mentally dramatic quality, sounded particularly well in the small hall, where the words were audible and the intimate chamber-music character of the music was not lost. The beauty of the string writing and the composer's real feeling for the human voice (a rare quality in the twentieth century) almost persuade one to forget the slightly precious and archaic idiom of the music, of which I, personally, am always and painfully aware in Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasy, which ended the programme. It has been said that Poulenc's music corresponds exactly to the foreigner's idea of French music—which means, I suppose, pretty, witty and bitty. This was certainly not true of the Aubade, and only very partially true of the Sextet, both played by the composer and members of the Leighton Lucas Orchestra on February 28th. Certainly the excursions into other composers' styles (I thought I even spotted Rachmaninov in the Sextet) invite accusations of all sorts ; for though they are always carried out in a manner which is unmistakably Poulenc's they are never personal and authoritative enough to justify an echoing of Moliere's " Je prends mon bien oft je le trouve." Far away the most impressive work at this concert was the Petite Suite by Albert Roussel. Its slightly sour harmony and sophisticated clumsiness conceal—at least they seem to conceal from most people—a most penetrating and unusual musical intelli- gence and sensibility, a passion for understatement which exceeds that of any English composer and an emotional retiringness- (but not coldness) which makes our models of impassivity seem almost
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