HERE AND THERE With ROGER WIMBUSH

André Previn

HONOURS

The Queen's Birthday Honours announced in June included the following: Michael Tippett (Knight Batchelor), Ruth Railton (DBE), Amy Simard (CBE), Anna instone and John Cuishaw (OBE) and Reginald Dixon (MBE). Miss Jennie Lee, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Education and Science (officially, but in fact the Minister responsible for the Arts) was made a Privy Councillor, a promotion without precedent and giving the Arts a Ministerial voice at Court, if not yet in Cabinet. Our congratulations to all, and if we single out Miss Instone and Mr Culshaw it is because they are so closely associated with the gramophone in the manufacture and the use of gramophone records

ANDRE PREVIN

When André Previn was in England a year ago I wrote of his passion for the music of Vaughan Williams, which struck me as odd from a man best known at that time as a jazz pianist and composer of film scores. The fact that he bad conducted Vaughan Williams in Houston, Texas, only enhanced the seeming incongruity. To think thus is, of course, shallow. If it was natural for Teddy Wilson of the Benny Goodman ensembles to play the Forty-Eight for his own pleasure, why should not a Hollywood composer show even some English people that there is more to VW than modal folkery, even if there was more tweed in Covent Garden's stalls for the Pilgrim's Progress than in all Harris. Now Mr Prcvin is about to realize an ambition to record the nine symphonies, starting with the big central three, and keeping his fingers crossed thereafter.

He spoke to me about this project just after he had finished Rachmaninov's Second Symphony for RCA-Victor in London, in which incidentally every movement save the first was recorded in a single 'take'. At the end of the session he announced the Vaughan Williams schedule to the orchestra. There was a good natured gasp, and the conductor issued a mild rebuke at this lack of patriotic fervour. A voice: "He was Welsh!". Plaid Cymru notwithstanding, Mr. Previn will start this major undertaking with the LSO in the autumn. "It will be interesting", he says, "for a young man to do them". His belief in this music is very real and he is a tireless advocate for VW wherever he goes in the world, and that is a long way these days. Another scheduled recording is the First Symphony of Sir William Walton. In view of the glowing tributes to his Shostakovich No. 5 it is splendid to have this latest addition to the star conductor class so much on our side. He regards Benjamin Britten as quite simply the greatest composer in the world today; he has done the Sinfonia da Requiem in the United States for CBS.

Previn's background is interesting. Born in Berlin in 1929 of Franco-German parents, he was at the Paris Conservatoire, where he came under the influence of Marcel Dupré, and moved to Los Angeles in 1940, where the influences were Ernst Toch and CastelnuovoTedesco, whom he describes as a walking encyclopedia. He then went in for a whole series of piano competitions, always coming second, and began scoring films for a living. "To hear your work well played within four days of writing it is a tremendous experience. I was never sorry I worked for the mass media. It was a marvellous life for a young man of 20, surrounded by a luxurious evironment and pretty girls, and all the time acquiring a secure feeling about the orchestra". However, he did turn down invitations to do popular concerts, accepting lesser fees to conduct totally serious concerts by lesser orchestras in various parts of the States. Hollywood is, of course, full of expert musicians and composers—like Rozsa, whose Violin Concerto was recorded by Heifetz, and the records of the Hollywood Quartet are still treasured; only recently their recording of the Schubert C major Quintet was in the 'wants' column. It was here that the composing, the conducting and the piano playing took shape, under the nearest conditions we have today to the demanding and rapidly consuming European courts of the eighteenth century.

As a composer he has a symphony for St. Louis in November and a set of orchestral variations for Houston, where he will be sharing the conducting with SirJohn Barbirolli. His musical, Coco (based on the life of Madame Chanel of scent fame, who is still active at 80), with lyrics by Alan Lerner (iVIy Fair Lady), is due on Broadway, and his latest film score (he likes to do one a year) is for Goodbye Mr. Chips, which goes on the floor in England in February with Richard Burton. At the same time he will be conducting the LSO in three London concerts, and the Hallh in four in Manchester and Sheffield, a city that was new to him. "The English Pittsburgh" I explained; "ask William Steinberg". Engagements in Berlin and Vienna will follow. As a pianist his preference is for ensemble work. He has recorded the Franck and Debussy Sonatas and the Fauré Trio. As for the jazz, he never played in clubs, where he hated the atmosphere, but is still happy to improvise at the piano. Perhaps there may be a few records. All in all, Mr Previn reveals something of the protean character of Leonard Bernstein, and if we put that the other way round the compliment is as genuine. When I left him he was about to drive out of London to find a house, for he is paying us the compliment of wanting to live here for half the year.

LOOKING BACK

TheJuly 1925 issue opened with "The Tests", which referred not to cricket but to tests of gramophones held in London one evening between six o'clock and half-past ten, an endurance test for the audience, who had to vote on machines "from the Peter Pan to the Vocarola". The winners received gold, silver and bronze medallions specially minted for the occasion. This curious event was part of The Gramophone Congress, to which I referred last month. Now that most readers have custombuilt gramophones such a contest would be impracticable, but it may well have made an impact on development in its day.

At Covent Garden the German season included Lohengrin. It was just 50 years since its first performance there in 1875, attended by Herman Klein, who recalled this first production in Italian with a French tenor (Nicolini), who became the second husband of Patti, and with Albani as Elsa. Albani was a French-Canadian and thus entitled to Royal honours, becoming a DBE at the age of 72! "I have no patience to write about Elekira and its horrors" Wrote Mr Klein, who proceeded to castigate the standard of German tenors then at the Garden. One of them, called Soot, had been hastily brought over by air, an early example of the impact of the aeroplane on the international opera circuit. Toti dal Monte and Maria Jeritza each made their first English appearances during the Italian season. Sydney Grew was writing about Moszkowski, a faded figure now, but whose music once adorned every domestic piano, and whose suite From Foreign Paris was often played. The Royal Philharmonic Society played his major works a great deal. He had just died destitute in Paris, having sold all his copyrights.

Ernest Newman had just published his "A Music Critic's Holiday", which was reviewed by WRA over three pages. This was a powerful attack on modern music, but the principle, adumbrated by Augustine Birrell, is sound; that only when one has allowed the critics of the past to illumine the artists of the past is it possible to acquire a yardstick whereby to evaluate the present. As Newman put it; the long view must be the backward view. Of Stravinsky in 1925 WRA wrote: "Surely we note most surely in him the decay of a notable talent wilfully perverted", and he quoted Newman answering a claim for Schoenberg that he was "a man decades ahead of our epoch". "There is not a single case in musical history" wrote Newman, "of a composer being a century ahead of his time; the greatest composers have all been perfectly comprehensible to the average instructed music-lover of their day". We are now in the third generation of 'modern art', and in a sense it is still true that it only works for a coterie. Yet I believe that today WRA would admit some new men to his Pantheon, and the subsequent career of Stravinsky will present the historian with an enigma. It is one thing for a great man to cross the Rubicon; it is quite another to spend a lifetime altering course. We would probably all agree that great art is an aristocracy into which one is born--"the million to one chance of a one in a million father and mother". The new problem is that art no longer makes an immediate emotional impact. Newman tells us that nowhere in Wagner's published letters is there a single complaint that the public was against him or unappreciative. It is this direct communication that has gone, and without it all art is sterile. This has got nothing to do with brains and very little to do with understanding. It has everything to do with a sense of wonder and worship. "From the heart it came; to the heart is will go", as Beethoven said of the Missa Solemnis.

The Celebrity of the Month was Frieda Hempel, one of the first Marschallins, who celebrated the centenary of Jenny Lind's birth by dressing up in costume and giving Lind recitals, just as Elisabeth S&JerstrOm has done on her LP. Is it not more enjoyable to listen to Marilyn Home singing opera without thoughts of Pauline Viardot, whose voice and presence we can never experience? Users of fibre needles were warned to tap on the barometer before going to bed and to check the weather forecast. Really, playing the gramophone can be made as difficult as the violin! Mr Grew ftffirnted that whenever he heard the clavichord or harpsichord the more grateful he was for the piano, and we give ourselves away as to whether we ascribe such a view to fashion or taste. An article on the Savoy Orpheans stated that they had between 500 and 1,000 tunes in their epersory and a photograph shows them in (mmaculate morning dress and office hair cuts.

Reviews included an extract from Zaza ("music bulging over like an obese, overfed woman, music from which anyone of average sensitiveness shrinks instinctively"), Erica Morini, described as a newcomer (just as she was when a record by her was issued not so long ago), Vesella's Italian Band in an arrangement of Solenne in quest'ora (Heavens!), the Irirtler Choir in Schubert's Litany, best known perhaps in the Cortot piano arrangement, Frank Titterton, whom I used to review in endless pop ballads, but who was in fact a fine singer and here heard in Handel and Mozart, John Thorne singing List's King of Thule (tucked away with all the Miscellaneous rubbish!), Aileen Stanley, for some reason called "the gramophone girl", just as years later Raie da Costa was to start her career as "the Parlophone Girl", Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence in what must have been a wonderful scene from a Chariot revue, and the Band of the Welsh Guards playing The Bells of Haslemere. A society report referred to "Mendelssohn's Concerto in E minor arranged for violin and orchestra", and a correspondent quoted a recording by Robert Browning, during which the poet suddenly exclaimed: "Good God, I've forgotten the words of my own poem". No tape editing then!

JOAN OF ARC

On May 16th, 1934, the redoubtable Ida Rubenstein sat down to dinner at a candle-lit table at her home in Paris with Jacques Chailley, the scholar who was producing mystery plays at the Sorbonne, and Arthur Honegger. She waisted them to collaborate in a dance-drama on the subject of St. Joan. This was the genesis of Jeanne d'arc au bucher. In the end it was Paul Claudel who wrote the poem, following a vision during a railway journey, Chailley having declined. The difficulty with all such works is what to do with them once their patron has gone from the scene. Nobody today would dance Ravel's Bolero or La Valse, both Rubenstein commissions, but the music remains, even if the former is "orchestration without music" and the latter a pastiche of Old Vienna. The real parallel here is the D'Annunzio-Debussy Saint Sébetstien. Now Vera Zorina, who was once the leading lady in On Your Toes at the London Coliseum and who was trained in ballet, has taken over some of these works, including the Debussy Bilitis music in its original form as background to recitation before it was turned into the Six Epigraphes Antiques for piano duet. When Jack Hylton put on the Joan piece at the old Stoll after the war he engaged Ingrid Bergman, and now London has heard a concert version with Vera Zorina, Alec Clunes (who has recorded a Peter and the Wolf), and the LSO. It is this performance that has been recorded by CBS. Operatically Joan of Are has been unlucky, and a work that sits uneasily either on the stage or the platform is a doubtful starter. Perhaps the gramophone is the answer here, and certainly it will be interesting to have this record.