MUSIC
ON Saturday evening the yearnings of many a Central European heart were fulfilled • for Bruno Walter was conducting Mahler at the Albert Hall. 6..ertainly the performance must have satisfied even those with the most exacting memories. Kathleen Ferrier sang the Songs of Dead Children and gave the music the warmest and purest tones of her beautiful voice, whose native coolness was welcome in this so nearly sentimental music. The third symphony had only once before been given in England, though it is over half a century old. " One is clubbed to the ground," said the composer of his own work, "only to be lifted again by angels' wings to the most exalted heights."
Like all Mahler's big works it is an extraordinary gallimaufry. Formally it consists of one symphonic poem, two scherzos, one song and one cantata. The funeral music in the first movement and the End of the World in the last are often perilously near the comic when Mahler summons up every ounce of his own energy and an astronomical number of orchestral foot-pounds to enunciate some colossal banality in Liszt's worst heroic manner. Yet even here those who find the composer's tremulously sensitive, restless and divided personality attractive will take the will for die deed, divine the grand idea beneath the grandiose expression. In the idyllic Andante no one could fail to be enraptured by the tenderness and grace, by this apotheosis of the rhythms of the Austrian country- side • for what Johann Strauss did for the waltz Mahler here does for the LAndler. Kathleen Ferrier, Dora van Doom (a fine soprano who unfortunately only visits us for Mahler concern) and the B.B.C. Choral Society gave us a spirited End of the World, and the orchestral playing by the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra was of a very high quality. It is fatally easy to make fun of Mahler, and he remains an unassimilably foreign composer ; but he distilled the flowers of a whole period of civilisation into his music.
* * * * Arthur Bliss's The Olympians opened the Covent Garden autumn season on Septemiser 29th. It is part comedy, part spectacle, part fantasy; and Bliss finds clever and apt—though to my mind never inevitable—music for all three. The librettist, J. B. Priestley, threw i,vay his chance of attaching a symbolical sigfilficance to the gods and differentiating them strongly from their human companions, and he concentrated on the comedy and the spectacle. Much of the action develops at the rate of the ordinary straight drama, and this when set to Bliss's exuberant music makes the pace very slow. The big choruses in Act 2 were effective, and the Lovers, who are types rather than individuals, were given some delightful music in the conventional operatic manner. The whole idiom of the music is epigonal rather than strongly original, a personal adaptation of R. Strauss and the Puccini of Turandot. The performance maintained a high standard all round. Shirley Russell and James Johnson sang the Lovers, Howell Glynne was an excellently Balzacian Lavattc and among the Olympians Margherita Grandi, though miscast according to traditional notions, was an intensely dramatic Diana. * * *
The London Opera Club's performance of Cimarosa's Secret Marriage at the Fortune Theatre is energetic if not very polished. The men arc very much better than the women. But not even a performance by a company from La Scala (which I once heard) can make palatable the endless repetitions and the ceaseless chinking of the small change of eighteenth-century operatic idiom.
MARTIN COOPER.
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