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TUESDAY MID-DAY CONCERTS: MANCHESTER

32nd SEASON, 1946-47

FIRST CONCERT : TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1946

• The season will consist of · THIRTY CONCERTS.

Season Coupon-Tickets .£1.5.0 are obtainable together with a prospectus for the season from the Director of Con­certs, Edward Isaacs, 19 Amherst Rd., Fallowfield, Manchester 14

A Short Story of a Long Friendship

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. ROSA NEWMARCH

• Rosa Newmarch knew Sibelius intimately and often visited him in Finland. Few persons have a better understanding of this tit.anic personality and his music. The book contains full analysis of the seven sym­phonies, de~criplions of visits to his home, numerous leHers, many imeresting photographs of Sibelius in his home at Jarvenpaa. autograph fetters, and a Foreword by GraD~i1Je Bantock.

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A II other correspondence to the publishers :­

----Contents for August-----., Salut. E. H. W. Meyerstein The Piano Sonatas of Joseph Haydn. Philip Radcliffe The Salzburg Mozart Festival, 1906: Reminiscences of

an Amateur. Paul Hirsch The First Performance of Mozart's Entfiihrung in Lon­

don . Alfred Einstein A Note on the "Additional Accompaniments." Arthur

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dfiiiE PUBLISHED BY THE HALLE CONCERTS SOCIETY

FDlTORIAL BOARD: T . E. BEAN, J . BOULTON, E. A. DOWBIGGIN. MSS suitable for publication in HALLE (to be paid for at agreed rates), material for review, and lellers

to the Editor, should be addressed to the Editorial Board, 8 Sl. Peter's Square, Manchester 2.

Number One CONTENTS August, 1946

PAGE

GREETINGS. 2

THE HALLE HERITAGE by Neville Cardus 5

ALBUM LEAF by James Agate 7

THE PLEASURES OF LISTENING by Eric Blom 9

HECTOR BERLIOZ by John Boulton 10

A TTENDING REHEARSALS by T. E. Bean 12

PAGE

CoNSIDERED TRIFLES by "Autolycus" 15

NOTES BY THE BIRD CALL by D. B. Wyndham Lewis 17

THE HALLE CLUB 18

THE HALLE CHOIR 20

HERE IS A PICTURE. 21

WHERE TO HEAR THE HALLE 22

I T would be presumptuous, at a christening, for the new arrival to go into elaborate details about its plans and prospects for the future. It would also be a little

. precocious! A christening is an occasion for inviting welt-wishers, who have known the proud parents for many years, to indulge in generalisations, platitudes and toasts. And our principal contributors to this first issue of HALLE have fulfilled that function with the distinction expected of them.

Neville Cardus, whose book, TEN COMPOSERS, is one of the most delightful books on music written in recent years, writes nostalgicaUy of the Halle from 12,000 miles away. James Agate, from nearer home, starts a voltage of electric hares which will make the Delian, Brahmsian, Bart6kian and other greyhounds ' strain violently at the leash. Eric Blom, the Editor of the Master Musician Series and newly appointed editor of the next edition of GRO VE'S offers salutary advice on the responsibility of the concert-goer for the programmes he listens to. While D. B. Wyndham Lewis contributes a profoundly irrelevant piece of research into the origins of a famous libretto which can be counted upon to lose us outright the embarrassing support of all who take their pleasures too seriously. Added to which are articles of more domestic interest-as befits a christening.

The next issue of HALLE-if the paper position permits-should coincide with the start of the 1946-7 concert season and from then until the end of the season HALLE wi11 exist to perform another and perhaps more vital function-that of quickening the interest of listeners in the music to be heard at the Halle Concerts. It may not sound a very epoch-shaking endeavour. But we happen to believe that musical writing which aims higher than that is like

"Vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself And falls on the other".

Readers can help us to avoid this contretemps by telling us of their needs-and by telling others if we are successful in fulfilling them.

•

page two

GREE'I'INGS PHILIP GODLEE Chairman, Halle Concerts Society

It gives me great satisfaction to welcome the appearance of this Journal. It bears a proud name-a name which has never stood higher in public favour than it does to-day.

This name suggests that it is chiefly concerned with the affairs of the Halle Concerts Society, and certainly it is intended that it should stimulate interest and strengthen the ties which unite the public and the orchestra. But as a review of current musical events it has a wider appeal and should serve to foster an informed interest in the art of music.

FamiUarity, the proverb says, breeds contempt, but in matters of Art intimacy can only breed respect, admiration and affection. There has never been a time when so many opportunities presented themselves to so many people to become familiar with music and the number of masterpieces that come into the average listeners' list of accepted favourites has never been so large as it is to-day.

The publication of HALLE is one more sign of the vitality of music and it will play its part in the renaissance which sooner later is going to restore to this reputation as a musical nation.

JOHN BARBIROLLI Conductor and Director of Music

rather than country its

These few words are in the nature of a welcome and greeting to our new pubUca­tion HALLE. What magic and nostalgia the word conjures up. Eighty-nine years of vital music making interspersed with all the great musical figures that have appeared

on this vast canvas during that time. Figures who have passed into history but whose power and magic have served to inspire those of us privileged to follow and carry on this fine, solid, supremely healthy tradition. I advisedly use the word "healthy" for it has never been an institution dependent on the erratic or

page three

to

dliiil PHILIP GOD LEE

JOHN BARBIROLLI

(pace the Americas) erotic whim of man or woman, but on the love and loyalty of its own citizens of Manchester.

Knowing in whose hands this magazine is going to be, I prophesy for it a similar tradition. Most musical magazines are either shop windows for moribund or pre­maturely deceased anthems, or interminable analyses of works which in the main must live by their beauty or inward spiritual meaning and values rather than by a public dissection of their tissue and bone structure. Useful and admirable this may be, but you don't try to teach an appreciation of classical sculpture by first holding forth in ecstasy on the perfect bowel and intestinal formation of the Venus da Milo. Rather I like to think of this new magazine as a link, a link forged to create new and firmer attachments between orchestra and concert-goer, also to strengthen our listeners' delight in old favourites and quicken interest in the new. So often the words "I know what I like" are apt to mean "I like what I know", and many are the tales I could tell of the enthusiastic reactions of audiences to works they would not have ventured to come to hear if not surrounded by some of their old friends.

Also as a means by which the needs and delights of our audience should reach the orchestra, and the audience know more of the life and difficulties of what is inaccurately termed even the "humblest member of the orchestra". There is no such thing: every member of the orchestra (in a really first-class orchestra) is of the most vital importance to the whole, and even the seating of a string section is an art, so that the needs, temperamental and otherwise, are satisfactorily adjusted. Already I fear I have gone on longer than I intended and perhaps digressed from my original intent just to send my greetings and blessing. From time to time I hope (scant hope) I shall have a moment's leisure to talk to you a little regarding musical things I feel deeply about, but I could not bear the first number to go out without my warmest greetings ~nd good wishes to the Magazine, the Editorial Staff, and to you, the faithful and gallant 6,600, who are the inspirers of our efforts to make the names of Halle and Manchester ever more glorious in the musical annals of our land.

Bernard Shaw, who was born a year before BERNARD SHAW the formation of the Halle Orchestra, was -a Postcript written to on his ninetieth birthday by the

Manchester Evening News. He was asked:

"What do you consider Manchester's greatest contribution to national life and

culture ?" ; '~

He replied "The Halle Orchestra and the Manchester Guardian."

I. DIMINUENDO.

JOHN BARBIROLLI

CONDUCTOR AND MUSIC DIRECTOR

HALLE CONCERTS SOCIETY

These photograph, were taken b~' (he Army Kinematograph Service at Eindhoven, Holland. d/1 rin~ {b~ Halle Orchestra's B.L..4. IOlir ill 1944.

3. CRESCENDO.

2. SFORZANDO.

page five d-liiiE

SIR CHARLES HALLE-Founder of the Halle OrChf'Slra .

The Halle Heritage By :NBVILLE CARDUS

My first experience of a Halle concert occurred on December 3rd, 1908, when I was 18, and to this day I can't imagine what inscrutable forces led me there. Music in those days was a perquisite of the middle and upper classes. The Halle Concerts were esoteric in Manchester, not to say foreign . Each Thursday, carriages at 9.45 made a cavalcade down Oxford Street to the purlieus of Victoria Park. Sometimes you would hear even the coachman whipping-up the horses in German . The man in the street, the hoi pol/ai, was not encouraged to listen to music forty years ago. We in Manchester knew our "Messiah" all right; but the names of Tchaikovsky and Wagner

were not to be pronounced without caution . Music appreciation had not got to work ; it was not yet thought that the engine-driver of the "Cheltenham Flier" would cope with the signals at a complicated junction all the better and more dexterously if that day he had listened absorbedly to Op. 109 of Beethoven.

At the back of the Free Trade Hall were a few seats and standing-places at a shilling each-the tradesmen's entrance, so to say. This point of vantage was known as "The Grid" beea use it was situa ted over a hea ting a ppa ra tus which sent up stea m as though from Nibelheim . To obtain a reasonably healthy standing-place involved an hour's wait in the cold fog or rain of Peter Street.

From the "Grid" then, I first beheld the broad back of Richter. As though it happened yesterday, I can see him bowed a little over the score, his forearms partly outstretched, the entire orchestra and audience transfixed . Then he moved his baton, and for the first time in a public place the solemn and grand theme was heard of the A flat symphony of Elgar. I remember nothing else of my baptism at the Halle ; but I do not , and never shall, forget the humane breadth and ease of Richter's c~cting oCthe "Meistersingers" overture. If anybody supposes that this music­or any single bar from the opera-has since Richter's day been given his geniality and dignity and warmth of heart, they are labouring under a severe delusion . Tn this relative world even , there are one or two truths which, once experienced , are absolute. Richter's "Meistersinger", and his Beethoven; Kreisler in the Elgar Violin Concerto; Busoni in the "Emperor" Concerto; Ranjitsinhji; Forbes Robertson as Caesar in Shaw's play; the beauty of Salzburg seen at sunset from the meadows of M orgz ; these are not matters of taste but of objective reality.

From the Halle concerts of those days to the present time, the tale can be told of a revolution both in the social and e.:onomic and cultural life of the North of England. After 1914, Sir Thomas Beecham broadened the basis of musical enjoy­ment all over England; this connoisseur, this man of fastidious attitudes, none the less knows the great secret of nature that makes everybody kin. We didn't call him "Tommy" for nothing. The Halle Orchestra became gradually a possession of Lancashire county, and under Hamilton Harty the man in the street included it, with the Lancashire county cricket team, as an institution.

THE FREE TRADE HALL-The Home of the Halle

Before THE BLITZ After '----------- Photographs by Manchesler E yening News ----------'

Time was when the Halle Orchestra looked, and not only sounded German. Then the assimilative process set in; the style of the Halle began to express the county character; it avoided the niceness and rather feminine ways of the L.P.O., for example. Lancashire common-sense made a good working-alliance with an inherited tradition of German seriousness . As a consequence, the Halte has remained unparalleled in England as an interpreter of works of symphonic dimension and magnanimity. But-and here I come to the point I wish particularly to emphasise in this article-the fame of the Halle was achieved in days of an exclusive and prosperous class; it is now the pride and delight of everybody. Moreover, I can vouch for the truth that nothing that happens in Manchester carries the good name of the city farther across the world than the Halle Orchestra. Those of us who are of middle years, and were born in Lancashire, owe so much to the Halle concerts for those pleasures of life that are the only ones which persist and prove the meaning of life-so much do we owe that jf we tried literally to pay the debt we could only begin by an obeisance of our entire physical and spiritual being.

The story of the re-creation of the Halle during the darkest days of the war; the call to Barbirolli and Barbirolli 's terrific labours and his intense, almost ruthless idealism; the loyal co-operation of the instrumentalists; then the growing reports of the orchestra's excellences, especially of the interpretation of the A flat symphony of Elgar-this story has travelled across America and has long since reached Australia. If the Halte Orchestra could be brought to Australia on a short tour, the welcome given would be prodigious- and the influence on music inestimable. But as overseas we read of the deeds of the Halle, and as my Lancashire blood tingles, and as I cry out, "And I not there !" a "snag" appears in the general rejoicings. Can the Halle continue at such pressure? An artist is not a mechanical stove. What is Manchester doing to deserve this great orchestra? What is the city doing to guarantee a continuance of these ra re delights? Delights which, as I have reminded you, were hard won by the average man and boy four decades ago. Perhaps I might amend a familiar motto : What Sydney has accomplished to-day perhaps Manchester wil1 emulate to-morrow. For Sydney, not exactly a burgeoning garden of culture, has, through the New South Wales Government and the Sydney City Council, made a grant of £30,000 for three years to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

With this item of news I will bring to an end this message of a Lancashire man's memories of the Halle and his hopes-and insinuations!

, ~.

page seven d-lilll Album Leaf

By JAMES AGATE

THE Pleasures of Listening. Yes, but why seek the opInIon of a dramatic critIc almost entirely preoccupied with the Pains of Looking, a book critic stifled with the Plagues of Skipping, a film critic asphyxiated with the Penalties of Technigazing ? Presumably because I am an old Halle fan. I shudder at the last word, and could almost break off to write an essay on the Decline of Taste.

The joy of great music? Too 'big a subject for an essaylet. Let me take refuge in reminiscence. I was taken to my first Halle concert at the age of seven. Yes, reader, the year was 1884. I was taken by my nurse to the Reform Club in King Street, and deposited in the hall to wait until my father had finished his dinner. Then in a yellow four-wheeled cab with red plush seats to the Free Trade Hall and a seat in the gallery with a view of Halle's left profile and, when he was playing the piano, a full view of his back, the idea being that I, as a commencing student of that instrument, might observe the fingering. I thought Halle a very nice old gentleman, but a tame player with less than half my mother's fire. It is only fair to say that she had studied under Fraulein Heinefetter, a pupil of Chopin.

Later on came the Christmas performance of Bandel's Messiah. Edward Lloyd looked to me as though he wore a toupet-but nobody else has ever sung "Comfort Ye" so well. Santley's voice was gone even then (I don't believe there was ever a time when it wasn't gone!) He sounded like a lion in delirium tremens, and in "Why do the Heathen" his head and hands shook with something which was half daemonism and half palsy. Albani was tremendous in ruby velvet, while I was sorry for Ada Crossley who, as became her inferior station as a contralto, generally moped in black. I adored Norman-Neruda long before she became Lady Halle. I thought her ugly but supremely elegant, and can still see that thin gold bangle slide up and down her bowing arm. Joachim I thought a bore, and a bore who was nearly always out of tune.

Entin Richter vint. And J remember how, at the first performance in Manchester of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic Symphony, Richter laid down his baton in the second movement and let the orchestra conduct itself. Carreno in the Tschaikowsky Piano Concerto in B flat minor. There, if you like, was fire and force and a walloping pair of arms and the proper atmosphere of a blacksmith's shop. Lots and lots of great pianists-Busoni, d' Albert, Rosenthal, Backhaus, Petri, Pachmann, whom I thought a charlatan, and one or two Englishmen I didn't )hink much of (a) because they were English and (b) because I didn't think they,-ould really piay. Piano quartets, yes; but the Concerto in the Grand Style, no. I remember crying when on one occasion the pianist turned out to be Leonard Borwick. My first Elgar. The meandering Delius. Was ever anything less like a fair? Or less like Paris? And I remember my Daudet:

Maison Benie! Que de [ois je suis venu la, me reprendre a la Nature, me guerir de Paris et de ses fievres.

Did Daudet in very sooth desire to be cured of Paris and its fevers? Did Delius ever have fevers of which to be cured? My first Symphonic Poem, Strauss's Don Juan. And, of course, lots of Wagner, conducted in the heavy, beer-and-tobacco­stained, German and proper manner.

page eight

But those were the days of tune when, as likely as not, the season would open with the "Euryanthe" Overture of Weber, always provided it was not Cherubini's "Anacreon" or Nicolai's "Merry Wives". And once at least during the season we should be given the "Oberon" and "Freischiitz" Overtures, and some stout lady in yellow satin would sing "Ocean, thou mighty monster" and look as though she was prepared to swallow as well as apostrophise it. Or shriek a greeting to some Hall of Song, and later, after clapping on more tulle, send out an S.O.S. in the shape of Senta's Ballad. But all this was the age before Bartok, about whose music a famous virtuoso said in my hearing, "Yes, I know. Like hitting the piano-lid with walking­sticks !"

In those days the leader of the orchestra was Willy Hess. At the same desk sat Siegfried Jacoby, who taught the violin to two of my brothers, was a great consumer of tea and buttered toast, and a mordant wit. I remember being called in to play the piano in a Concertante by somebody, and being in a state of terror the entire time and hardly reassured by the "Veil, ve finished together, und dat is something". Yes, mine is a musical family. It is not given to every young man to have got lost on Snowdon in company with the grandson of the great Manuel Garcia for whom Rossini composed The Barber of Seville. Or to have met Carl Fuchs, the 'cellist, on the top of He\vellyn. Or even to have played the piano to Henry Wood two years before his promenade concert.

But I must be getting back to Manchester and the Free Trade Hall. Of what did I think as my legs dangled and my cream socks fell over my black shoes, which fastened with a button and strap? Well, I used to weave romances about the people in the gallery opposite. And I conceived a violent hatred of the man on my other side, who never spoke to me throughout eight years and sat stiff as a poker, rather like a male Betsey Trotwood.

With my dislike of him I connect certain distastes which have remained with me all my life. Nearly all slow movements, because they will go on too long. Beethoven, in my early view, was a great offender, particularly in the Seventh Symphony where I still think he should have wound up the Allegretto three minutes earlier. Anything called a recitative, nearly all Bach, vast quantities of that dry, stuffy Brahms. All the piano pieces of Schumann, and most of all that loathsome thing called "Grillen". As against this I had my special favourites. There was Adolph Brodsky, who didn't seem to me to be very good as soloist, leader or conductor, but whom I liked for his genial expression and tummy. Singers, too-Marie Brema; a lady who was always known as Miss Fillunger; that great bass singer, Georg Henschel, whose "Spring" is one of the most beautiful songs ever written; a colossal Swede of the name of Lundquist.

With these goes the memory of the best musical criticism this country has ever seen :t

"Mozart has done more to debauch the critical sense of musicians than any composer who ever lived; practically no one ever mentions his name except in words of absolutely undis­criminating eulogy.... But those who do not lose their heads over Mozart are constrained to point out that no organism can have such qualities as his without having the correlative defects. If the stream of speech runs so easily and so unceasingly, it is bound at times to run a little thin; and it is thinness that wearies some people after a day or two spent in going not merely through the half-dozen masterpieces of Mozart but through a large quantity of his work of all kinds. One rather tires of seeing what is almost nothing at all said with such perfect grace and such formal impeccability . ... The Mozart fanatic rhapsodies about Mozart, but does not think enough about him."

t This crilicism is discussed by " Aul0 Iycus " on page 15-Ed.

d-liiLEpage nine

That was written by the musical critic of the Manchester Guardian on the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Mozart. It comes first in my first newspaper­cutting book, and the date is January 27th, 1906. Is anybody writing stuff as good as this to-day, in London, Sydney, Kamchatka, Co!wyn Bay? No. The Manchester Guardian and the Halle Concerts are the last remaining glories in a city which, when I last visited it, seemed entirely given over to motor salesmen.

And here I must stop. All that I have been writing about happened many years ago. And I am still listening to music. As the great poet so nearly wrote:

The Child is Father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural melody.

But no Bart6kery, if you please!

The Pleasures of Listening By ERIC BLOM

THE war, whatever its iniquities, has done some great things for music in this country. It has created new audiences and broken down those inhibitions which kept many people from attending concerts because they felt themselves to be deficient in some fancied educational attributes demanded of the higher grade of music-lovers. Efforts to make good music a war-time solace have taught millions all over the country that it can be loved at first hearing with a minimum of previous acquaintance and asks no strenuous intellectual wooing before it yields delight.

Of course the word "pleasure" can cover a multitude of experiences-if not of sins-in music as in other walks of life. There are listeners to whom concert going is an emotional orgy. They enjoy Rachmaninoff in C minor because it recalls the film "Brief Encounter" (where it was really Celia Johnson rather than Rachmaninoff who turned their hearts over). To others it is a question of habit. They look forward to another performance of Mozart's Kleine Nachtmusik because it recalls the first rapture of hearing that adorable work. But loyalty, though one of the most beau­tiful of human virtues, can (as Galsworthy has shown in another context) have far from beautiful consequences. In music it can have the most baneful and narrowing effect on audiences if it leads to the unquestioning acceptance of a certain fixed number of composers and works. In this country we are not too unduly inclined as the Germans to worship the classics unthinkingly, nor so patriotic as the French to fall into the sin of chauvinism, but there is no doubt that we are excessively loyal to what we like and-this is the point-to what we once have liked. Not only music, but our capacity for enjoyment, would benefit enormously if we could cultivate in this respect a mild talent for betrayal! What we might lose in self-esteem we should amply regain in breadth of outlook and scope of enjoyment.

Why should we feel uncomfortable if we find that a work which we once adored has passed through a phase beginning with boredom and finally arriving at distaste? There are works-excellent in their measure-which cannot stand too frequent a repetition. A performance once every three of four years is as much as we should ask of them. And even among the acknowledged masterpieces much harm can be done by thoughtless repetition. If I feel, as I do, that I can hardly face Beethoven's Fifth Symphony again, things have come to a pretty pass. I admire the work as much as ever, but I just do not wish to hear it. It is not that familiarity has bred contempt, but that reiteration has bred satiety.

page ten

What Can we do to renew our pleasure in listening? There are many answers. The first and most obvious is that we should encourage those who organise our concerts to provide the greatest width and variety in programme making by our readiness to respond to experiences of all sorts. Almost everything that is good of its kind is potentially capable of striking one's fancy-subject to certain limitations of taste-if we only give it the chance.

Another safeguard against satiety is to seek not only to love music but to be interested in it . We should think and talk intelligently about it. I do not mean that we should be prigs who enliven the conversation of tea parties by dissertations on Rameau's fundamental bass. But we can cultivate the kind of mentality that will recoil from the mere unqualified exclamation "I adore music" and respect the person who, striving to free himself from mere prejudice, will dare to express admiration for this, indifference to that and distaste for the other and will give his reasons for these reactions. Not that I would urge anyone to talk about their love of music. That is best kept secret. It is interest we should cultivate, and that can be discoursed upon and kept alive in endless ways. Given that, love will come of itself to those who have not yet recognised it, it will turn into something better in those who sentimentalise over it, and it will abide the more securely with those who have always had it.

Hector Berlioz By JOHN BOULTON

During the coming season the Halle Orchestra will play the (ollowing works by Berlioz .. Overture, "Carnaval Romain" .. "The Damnation of Faust" (for Soloists. Chorus and Orchestra) .. "Harold in Italy" (for Viola and Orchestra) .. and "Symphonie Fantastique."

WHEN Barbirolli raises his baton for the first work on the present Halle season it will be to prepare himself and his players and us for the upholding of an important Halle tradition. The first work to be played this season is Berlioz's overture "Carnaval Romain".

During the years between 1836 and his coming to England in 1843, Charles Halle lived in Paris. Then, the Romantic movement glowed at white heat and Paris was the crucible where, as yet unskimmed of dross, much of the true metal shone. Liszt was there and Chopin; Dumas, Balzac, Hugo and Heine; Delacroix, Millet and Corot. Amongst them were the imitators and hangers-on. There too was that most independent spirit, the greatest innovator of them all, Louis Hector Berlioz. His genius took in all that the movement had to offer and his imagination over­flowed the melting pot of an art in the throes of revolution. Halle spent much of his time in the company of this man, then in his early thirties and by no means accepted widely as a musician of genius. Then and there, one of the most virile traditions of the Halle Orchestra was determined.

The first Halle concert, given in Manchester on January 30th, 1858, included a work by Berlioz, whose compositions were still not known to more than a handful of men in England. The first eight Halle programmes included no less than six performances of orchestral works by him, and since then, year by year, practically the whole of his output has been made familiar to English audiences by the Halle Orchestra under a succession of great conductors. Many who could not know Halle will remember Harty, who brilliantly and passionately upheld the tradition.

page eleven cfIiliE

Between those two in time stands the great classicist Richter, seeing the Light of Romantic art through the eyes of Berlioz and pLacing his work above that of all other French composers. In the eighty-ninth year of the Orchestra's existence, there is now Barbirolli, blessed with an unparalleled insight into the beauties of French composition, opening another seilson with' a work by the great Frenchman.

Had the Romantic movement produced but one orchestral composer-Berlioz; had Schumann, Liszt and Mendelssohn not lived, music still would have claimed a place alongside literature and painting as a moving force in the era of romantic art. Mendelssohn polished and repolished the existing symphonic mould and failed to pour real greatness into it. We ' know him best for other things more simply en­compassed by the romantic spirit. Schumann wrestled with the symphony and gave up only when he had prepared the way for another. He prophesied aright and it was Brahms' inheritance to fuse romantic spirit with classical form. Liszt missed real greatness with essays in the pure technique of non-classical orchestral expression. Only Berlioz was truly successful in making the orchestra a vehicle for romantic art because only he really faced the problem. He did not even try to use existing pat­terns; nor could his imagery be contained within existing resources of time and instrumentation. Music for him must have the sweep and grandeur of a Shakespeare play, a Hugo novel; the ever changing, multitudinous incident of a Scott ballad; the colour and crude vigour of a Byron epic. It was not enough that music should comment, epitomise or accompany. It must tell the whole story-it must be romance in itself and of itself. He would set life to music; that would be his theme and his pattern.

Berlioz's greatness was long disputed ; by a dry and dwindling few it still is. His greatness surely lies in having, at a time of crisis in art, seen a problem large and faced it; in having illumined his effort with music of undying loveliness and in having contributed an everlasting influence to orchestral technique. By these tokens he ranks with Haydn and Beethoven. The history of many composers whose worth was not self evident is a patchwork of colourful popularity stitched here and there into years of neglect. The art of Hector Berlioz is a brightly coloured thread, catching continuously the eye of discernment. It is woven into the very fabric of the Halle Concerts Society, there to provide adornment and strength to the years of its existence.

THE KING'S HALL. BELLE VUE The Present" Week-end" Home of Halle

page twelve

Attending Rehearsals By T. E. BEAN

OJ • • • Olympians in thei~ shirt sleeves:'

STUART KNUSSEN (JUNR.) -Double Bass.

process of realisation? That is the kind of pleasure which can be experienced at any time in the rehearsal room of a symphony orchestra-if you have the stomach for it. There you can see intractable material being hammered into shape, technical difficulties painfully solved, aesthetic problems hopefully tackled until there evolves from the dust and turmoil what has all the appearance of being a spontaneous and effortless performance.

Added to the musical interest there is also the never failing human interest of observing the impact of such work on the men and women engaged in it. To see two such sincere artists as Clifford Curzon and John Barbirolli co-operating with eighty other musicians in perfecting a work like Nights in the Gardens ofSpain, until the lovely iridescent texture of the music is realised in sensuous sound, is to have an

To see an orchestra in the throes of rehearsal is a revealing experience. But it is one which should be sought only by the case-hardened. Impressionable young ladies who have been nurtured in the belief that musicians, by virtue of their craft, are first cousins to the angels , should avoid it at all costs. Or, if they must see the Olympians in their shirt-sleeves, let them as a preparatory measure first steep them­selves in the writings of Rabelais and the chronicles of Chaucer. Only then should they risk the disillusionment of a ring-side view.

I won't pretend that the reward is not worth the shedding of many pretty illu­sions. It undoubtedly is. What wouldn't the lover of fine architecture give to be able, once in a while, to see a Wren masterpiece, not as a finished building with every stone in its place, but as a dusty workshop-an artist 's dream in the

ENLD ROPER - Horn.

page thirteen cIIillE

, "'-. ' ~. ' ~ .-. ­

.~

'\~ ,

(:. ' , ~ I .~

~

..... - ' .~ , ~.

,../) WALLACE H. JONES-Tuba.

unforgettable insight into the nature of craftsmanship and the joys of fellowship.

For the conductor the work of rehearsal I

begins long before the music is placed on the stands . A conductor without con­science may sometimes be content to give a mere "reading" of a work, on the ground that he already "knows" it. But short cuts of that kind soon lead to dull and hackneyed performances-and the twilight of his reputation. To the conscientious conductor every work, even though it be as familiar as the "Unfinished" or the "Fifth" has to be absorbed and translated afresh at each performance. It has to become part of his bones and marrow. For the printed notes, in the words of a modern novel, are, after all, only "a kind of invisible ink in which the thoughts of

one mind are fixed in dumbness and sent forth, to be steeped in the transferring agent of another and there revivified , made vocal, turned to thought again" .

Having recreated the score in his imagination the conductor must next communi­cate his purpose to seventy or eighty highly individual specialists in what Dobson and Young have elegantly called the art of scraping, blowing and banging. And since human nature is compounded, among other things, of inertia and egotism, it is tolerably certain that these specialists will set up unconscious centres of resistance and indifference to the conductor's aim. To transform that resistance into an artistic unanimity of purpose, to change that indifference into eager co-operation, the conductor will require something more than a musical diploma and the patience of Job. He will need to possess that mysterious power of magnetism which compels all the molecules in a lump of iron to point silently and invisibly to one magnetic north. If he lacks this unteachable and unpredictable gift he may hope to become an explorer of continents, a splitter of atoms, a tamer of lions-he may even aspire to become the Music Critic of The Times, from which august eminence he may tell others how to conduct, but he can scarcely hope to become a great conductor himself.

Assuming him to possess this gift the conductor's next task is the careful bowing and phrasing of the parts so that at least a physical unanimity may be assured . J have known Barbirolli spend ten hours of what is academically known as a "rest­day" on this laborious and glamour-less routine. After which the librarian and principals have spent as much time again reproducing the "master copies".

The next stage in the rehearsal of a new work is the preliminary run-through, at which the players take stock of the pitfalls and express (usually in unmusical and unmeasured terms) their low opinion of the composer. After which the wind and string sections may separate to tackle their family problems, the full orchestra later recombining for the main business of hoodwinking the public into the belief that the playing of Petrouchka or Daphnis and Chloe is an unpremeditated art, a thing of fun and instinct!

page fourteen

For the players the process is often a long and tiring one. Gone are the days when the conductor of the Halle had to be content with one or two rehearsals. Some of the more difficult works may be in preparation for weeks before a note is heard in pUblic. And in the middle of a crowded season this can involve considerable wear and tear on the nerves of even the most phlegmatic tuba. Fortunately the strain is usually relieved by unexpected glints of humour. There was, for instance, the occasion when a visiting conductor held up the rehearsal of a difficult symphony while he launched into a garrulous account of the "spiritual significance" of a certain passage. He spoke at length (and in blank verse) about the misty mountain tops, the calm of nature, the solitude of height, the endlessness of space, and the inwardness of being. At the end of which the unfortunate player whose wrong note had released this spate of rhetoric anx iously enquired: "Excuse me, maestro I

Do you want it played loud or soft ?" To the onlooker there is also the further diversion of seeing a player so wholly

absorbed in the technical problem s of his craft as to appear comically indifferent to the purpose of the composer. To see the principal trumpet of the Halle, a cautious and thrifty man, slow of speech but marvellously sure in action, calculating at the approach of some soul-shattering climax, how he can "save his lip" during rehearsal so as to have something in reserve for the evening performance, is to know what Uncle Remus meant by "a spell of dry grins". Of course, this pre-occupation of the artist with mere technique is right and proper. Don Juan, in Strauss's Tone Poem of that name, may be overwhelmed with the beauty of Donna Anna. But if the horn player permits himself a similar luxury to the extent of forgetting to attend to the sanitation of his hazardous instrument, the consequences may be far from flatter­ing to that lady.

Yet despite these moments of light relief the process of preparation can be extremely wearing. And I often wonder how the players, after a grilling week of intensive rehearsal, manage to retain that zest and freshness so necessary to a perfect performance. The miracle is that they usually do-blase and blasphemous though they may be in talking about it !

"AD LIBITV""." CONDUCTOR AND LIBRARIAN-AT A BREAK IN REHEARSAL

-

dfiiiEpage fifteen

Considered Trifles Edited by "AUTOLYCl(S"

"Autolycus" (with the unsolicited aid of Mr. Agate) introduces what, it is hoped, will become a regular feature of HALLE. Readers are invited to send in passages from books on any subject under the sun which, in their opinion, add zest to the gentle art of listening to music. Quotations may be culled from the writings of professional critics, amateurs, musicolo­gists, dilletantes, pedants and boneheads, from the lovers and haters of music living or dead.

For every Trifle which finds its way into this column the sender will receive FIVE SHILLINGS. The source of each quotation must be clearly stated and the quotation itself (after this first issue) must not exceed 250 words in length.

• I HA VE just spent a profitable hour comparing Mr. Agate's "choice of the century" in musical criticism (see page 8) with the writings of another critic on the music of Mozart. Mr. Agate's Considered Trifle seems to me to suffer from one fatal defect. In removing the barnacles from the popular valuation of Mozart (a necessary opera­tion if Mozart is to be kept afloat in our affections) the writer is so thorough in his methods that he incidentally sinks the ship. Compare the result with the equally thorough but far more constructive appraisals of Mozart which were sparkling from the pen of Bernard Shaw in the 1890's :

It is still as true as it was before the Eroica symphony existed, that there is nothing better in art than Mozart's best ... In the ardent regions where all the rest are excited and vehement, Mozart alone is completely self-possessed : where they are clutching their bars with a grip of iron and forging them with Cyclopean blows, his gentleness of touch never deserts him : he is considerate, economical, practical under the same pressure of inspiration that throws your Titan into convulsions. This is the secret of his unpopularity with the Titan fanciers. We all in our native barbarism have a relish for the strenuous: your tenor whose B flat is like the bursting ofa boiler always brings down the house, even when the note brutally effaces the song; and the composer who can artistically express in music a transport of vigour and passion of the more muscular kind . . . is always a hero with the intemperate in music.

With Mozart you are safe from inebriety. Hurry, excitement, eagerness, loss of con­sideration, are to him purely comic or vicious states of mind. Now it happens that I have, deep in my nature, a frightful contempt for ... Titans and their like. The true Parnassian air aCts on these people like oxygen on a mouse: it first excites them, and then kills them. Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste for his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.-("Music in London", vol. 2, p. 286, by Bernard Shaw.)

Shaw, of course, was as alive as the author of Mr. Agate's Trifle to the mildew of "undiscriminating eulogy". The difference between them is that whereas Mr. Agate's critic attacks it with corrosive acid, G.B.S. prefers a light flick of the duster. Which method is the more effective let the following Trifle bear witness. It was written by Shaw on the Centenary of Mozart's death, in 1891 :­

The word is, of course, Admire, admire, admire; but unless you frankly trade on the ignorance of the public, and cite as illustrations of his unique genius feats that come easily

page sixteen

to dozens of organists and choir boys who never wrote, and never will write a bar of original music in their lives; or pay his symphonies and operas empty compliments that might be transferred word for word, without the least incongruity, to the symphonies of Spohr and the operas of Offenbach; or represent him as composing as spontaneously as a bird sings, on the strength of his habit of perfecting his greatest compositions in his mind before he wrote them down-unless you try all these well-worn dodges, you will find nothing to admire that is peculiar to Mozart: the fact being that he, like Praxiteles, Raphael, Moliere, or Shakespeare, was no leader of a new departure or founder of a new school. He came at the end of a development, not at the beginning of one; and though there are operas and symphonies . .. of his, on which you can put your finger and say "Here is final perfection ... and nobody, whatever his genius may be, will ever get a step further on these lines", you cannot say "Here is an entirely new vein of musical art, of which nobody ever dreamt before Mozart" .. . For my own part if I do not care to rhapsodize much about Mozart , it is because I am so violently prepossessed in his favour that I am capable of supplying any possible deficiency in his work by my imagination. Gounod has devoutly declared that Don Giovanni has been to him all his life a revelation of perfection, a miracle, a work without fault. I smile indulgently at Gounod, since I cannot afford to give myself away so generously (there being, no doubt, less of me); but I am afraid my fundamental attitude to Mozart is the same as his. In my small boyhood I by good luck had an opportunity of learning the Don thoroughly, and if it were only for the sense of value of fine workmanship wh.ich I gained from it, I should still esteem that lesson the most important part of my education. Indeed, it educated me artistically in all sorts of ways, and disqualified me only in one-that of criticizing Mozart fairly. Everyone appears a sentimental, hysterical bungler in comparison when anything brings his finest work vividly back to me. Let me take warning by the follies of Oublicheff, and hold my tongue.-(lbid, vol. I, p. 293.) . .

I wonder which will strike a more responsive chord in the hearts of the new audiences of 1946-the criticism which could only deplore the" thinness" of "the half-dozen (sic) masterpieces of Mozart", or the criticism which could detect in these same works "a perfection of temper and a refinement of consciousness" without parallel in music.

After my three-hundredth hearing of my favourite Mozart Pianoforte Concerto (at the moment it is the one in B flat to be played by Clifford Curzon in Manchester on February 26th, but I change my favourite as often as my linen, for variety'S sake) my vote goes overwhelmingly on the side of Shaw. The discovery made by Mr. Agate's critic, that during his amazing output Mozart occasionally, or frequently, or even often wrote from sheer facility rather than under the pressure of volcanic erup­tion, may be true enough. But as a criticism of his most characteristic work it seems about as relevant as saying that most of the hills in Lake District are considerably lower than Scafell. "Who deniges of it?" And who bothers, providing that the breeze on Catbells or the View from arrest Head bring their own individual refresh­ment to the spirit.

I should have liked to compare Shaw's appreciation of Mozart with the writings of Samuel Langford, Music Critic of the Manchester Guardian shortly after the period spoken of by Mr. Agate. He wrote about Mozart like a poet and lover. He left to the private detectives of musical criticism the study and classification of Helen's finger-prints. Enough for him the bloom on her cheek, the fugitive charm of her smile. "The player who does not become a finer creature when he is faced with Mozart's music" (he wrote) "is, so to speak, no musician at all. For we come back to that in the end. Other men compose music: Mozart is music".

Would-be earners of five shilling pieces could do worse than dip into the collected criticisms of Langford. They represent quite an outcrop of Considered Trifles.

page seventeen dIiliE

Notes by the Bird-Call By D. B. WYNDHAM I."EWrS

I.-AN ALLEGRO OF MOZART

DISCUSSING certain Mozartian tempi, Mr. Ernest Newman-I was his fag at Bay­reuth-recently mentioned that one of the master's few markings of "very fast" occurs in the Queen of the Night's furious aria in The Magic Flute. Mr. Newman did not go into the psychology of this. Clearly Mozart was in a relatively foul temper himself, due to being mixed up with the stage-director Schikaneder in the world's most obviously cockeyed libretto.

It was against a background of heavily gilt Viennese Baroque (1 790) that Schikaneder turned up one day with a newly written libretto beginning as a kind of fairy tale, going completely haywire in the middle, and ending as a woozy Masonic allegory. One may easily see Schikaneder leaning against a spindly malachite table with an enigmatic smile. Mozart has a wildish look. Half child, half angel, barring a fond­ness for the "dough", he cannot make sense of the script of this old ham. "What does it mean ?" he keeps saying, tearing at his wig.

"Old boy", says Schikaneder, "it's (hie) expressionistic. It'll burn 'em up." Having said which, Schikaneder reclines with a graceful flourish against a tall ormolu clock and falls flat.

At that period drunk and incompetent opera librettists, who to-day would be hounded from the stage into the underworld of musical journalism, were common enough. Schikaneder, however, being director of a Viennese theatre, could not be fired without calling a meeting of the backers, which Mozart was loth to do, apart from the difficulty of getting Joe Goldwasser at his city office between 12 and 4. So Mozart resigned himself (apart from that aria) with a shrug, and wrote his finest operatic work .

In any other city but easy, kindly, 6/8-time Baroque Vienna, Mozart would have taken a swing at Schikaneder and stormed out to get Da Ponte. But Vienna has a tradition. Compare the genial reception by Johann Strauss, much later, of those pedants who objected to his calling the Danube blue. "I call the Danuhe blue", said the genial Strauss to the critic of the Wiener Tageblatt , (a) because it is brown, and (b) because my whimsy gives people of your type, much-esteemed Herr, some­thing fresh to worry over than the carryings-on of your wife with a certain Herr Glockenspieler of 19 Kapucinerstrasse, which are, I need hardly say, notorious."

Having winged and sped which playful fancy, Strauss turned with a chuckle to composing a waltz called "Gurgling Pipes" for the Plumbers' Ball. Hence, similarly, The Maf{ic Flute, which I love no less than Mr. Newman (whose fag I was at Glynde­bourne).

Pis is the first of a series of NOTES which will be contributed to HALLE by

After reading Halle pass it on to one of D. B. WYNDHAM LEWIS your "Halle" friends

page eighteen

The dliiiE Club How it began-Plans for the future

THE birth of the Halle Club was so closely bound up with the past of the Halle Orchestra that we had better begin with a little family history.

The Halle Orchestra, during its eighty-nine years of life, has not always been a full-time professional orchestra in the sense that it now is. For the greater part of this period its players were engaged virtually concert by concert as their services were required. How they lived between concerts, how they employed or wasted their professional skill in the "close season" was their affair-and a precarious and wasteful affair it must often have been, both on cultural and economic grounds.

The link-up of the Halle players with the B.B.C. Northern Orchestra in 1934 offered the players much greater security and of course a much to be desired con­tinuity of work. But even then the Halle was not an orchestra in the sense of the Berlin Philharmonic or the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

By 1942 it had long been evident to everyone with eyes to see that if Manchester intended to playa worthy part in the new renaissance of music the Halle would have to be established once and for all on a full-time basis under a permanent conductor who could be assured of regular and adequate rehearsal.

The change-over-especially in the middle of the war and with the Free Trade Hall blitzed out ofexistence-carried grave risks. The financial reserves of the Society, though adequate in the days when thirty to fifty concerts a season were planned, were dangerously slight for the task of planning two hundred and fifty concerts a year, and though at the time the unprecedented demand for music lessened the risks, there could be no guarantee that after the war the orchestra would not have to face economic blizzards and "things that go bump in the night" against which the reserves would prove an all too insufficient protection.

In actual fact there was no choice. An enterprise which had been an integral part of the cultural life of Manchester for over eighty years could not timorously be wound up merely because the future was uncertain-especially in the middle of a war which had seen the spectacle of Dunkirk.

So the plunge was taken and the orchestra, for the first time in its history, became a full-time orchestra, with the world of music at its feet. The response was startling. Under the leadership of Barbirolli the orchestra began to attract audiences greater than any in its history. And what was still more encouraging, hardly a week passed without tangible evidence that many of these newcomers to the delights of music­despite the fact that most of them were young people of small or moderate means­were genuinely eager to assist the Society in carrying its new burdens-if only a way could be found.

The problem was-finding a way: There was already in existence an Endowment Fund which had been started in 1900 by private donation and which in the inter­vening years had increased to £1,200. Compared with the resources of·the great orchestras in America this fund was a mere bagatelle and totally inadequate to the tasks ahead. But it was a beginning. So why not invite the many would-be sup­porters of the Society to contribute to it? Such contributions would not

dfilltpage nineteen

materially affect the day by day financing of the orchestra, which had become an enterprise of too great a magnitude to be secured by casual donations. But they would assist in building up an adequate reserve fund which, in course of time, might become a vital bulwark in the economic structure of the Society.

To this end the Halle Club was formed. It began with the two-fold object of fortifying the Society's Endowment Fund and establishing a firmer link between the Orchestra and those who regularly attend its concerts. The more cautious members of the Committee estimated that perhaps a thousand to fifteen hundred people would respond. A few wild-eyed optimists put the figure at two thousand. The visionaries dreamt of three. As things turned out each group of prophets was counfounded in turn. For within a few months the membership had rocketed to over six thousand-and presented what, for a time, proved insoluble problems of organisation.

Subscriptions came from unexpected quarters and in surprising amounts. A lady from Ohio, "as a slight tribute to your courage in reorganising your orchestra in the darkest days of the war" sent £25 and asked to be enrolled as a life member. Another, from Cornwall, a collector of musical instruments, sent us a silver flute with instruc­tions to sell it and place the proceeds to the Endowment Fund. A gentleman from Didsbury, writing for a ticket for one of the Sunday concerts, worded his letter in this nonchalant way: "Dear Sir, Please send me a ticket for next Sunday's concert. I enclose a cheque for £125 7s. 6d. £100 as a paid up Gtt'arantor, £25 as a Halle Club Member, 7s. 6d. for the ticket, and a stamped addressed envelope for your reply". (The only thing he overlooked was a sedan chair to take us to the post office.)

Gratifying as was this response, both financially and as a sign of the public's appreciation of the hard work of the orchestra, it was not without its embarrassing side. The Halle staff, unless it were to suspend its concert activities entirely for a season, had no means of coping with it. Dr. Johnson, in his famous dictionary, defined a club as "an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions". Had only a thousand members joined the Halle Club the club could have conformed to this definition. A meeting could have been called, a committee elected, a con­stitution agreed and the season's activities planned. But what sort of business (apart from the community singing of a new Hallelujah Chorus) could we hope to transact at a meeting of six thousand-even assuming that others besides the life­member from Ohio were unable to attend? And what hall could hold such a concourse?

Faced with these difficulties three steps were decided upon: 1. The publication of a monthly journal as a means of establishing regular

contact with members. '

2. The appointment of an Organising Secretary whose first task would be to group the membersliip into districts for the more effective planning of club activities.

3. The appointment of a provisional central committee to prepare a draft constitution for the approval of members.

Over the publication of the Journal we came into head-on collision with Obstacle Number One-the paper shortage. After discussions extending over a period of eight months the Controller of Raw Materials decided that he had no power to

page twenty

grant paper for a new journal. We have been obliged to accept the decision and to fall back on casual publications as and when we can secure the paper on which to print them.

We were not anxious to appoint an Organising Secretary until we were sure we had discovered the right man. But eventually we found him in Mr. E. Arnold Dowbiggin, who bad founded a flourishing Music and Arts Club in Lancaster and whose enthusiasm and capacity for hard work promised to be fu lly equal to the task required of him. He took up his duties in March, since when he has aged considerably !

A provisional committee has been formed and is at work on the draft constitution. The regionalisation of the club-on which the range and effectiveness of its activities must ultimately depend-has still to be begun. How soon this last task can be completed will depend on the speed with which the 1946-47 Subscription Forms and Questionnaires are returned to the Organising Secretary.

In the words of the R.A.F., it is now-"Over to you !" T. E. B.

The Halle Choir The Halle Choir was re-formed in the spring of last year. Three whole day

sessions were held by the Chorus-Master, Mr. Herbert Bargett, and the Choir Secretary, Mr. Arthur Gregson. From over 850 applications 235 were selected to form the new Choir which, during the past season, has taken part in the following works with the Halle Orchestra: "Messiah", Verdi's "Aida" and "Requiem", and Beethoven's Choral Symphony.

During the summer months the Choir has been on holiday until September 12th, when Mr. Bargett will resume weekly rehearsals at St. Peter's Schools. The enthusiasm, however, is so keen that the Secretary has arranged 22 Summer Rehearsal Groups which will rehearse two of next season's choral works, Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust" and Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius". These groups are meeting weekly in the homes of Choir members.

"Faust", particularly, ~-requires a very strong chorus of men, and for this reason the Secretary of the Choir will be pleased to receive applications from tenors who are good readers. Auditions will be arranged as soon as possible.

THE EDITORIAL BOARD is grateful for assistance in the production of this publication from Messrs. C. Nicholls & Co. Ltd. and Messrs . Osborne ,

. Peacock Ltd., of Manchester.

page twenty-one

Here is a picture of part of the

UEUE which had formed at the Halle Booking Office last year when plans were open for the sale of season tickets.

Within five hours over 3,200 seats had been sold for the entire season (for the mid-week concerts alone).

Arrangements have again been made to deal expeditiously with the applications this year, and patrons are asked to note care­fully the date on which booking begins as advertised in the order-form accompanying the 1946-47 PROSPECTUS (Price 6d.).

Photo by Daily Express

d-lAiiE

cf!AllE

Where to Hear the dIAllE PROGRAMME FOR AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER

Date Time Town Hall Conductor Soloists

Aug, 14 15

7 6.45

Wigan Leicester

Queen's Hall De Montfort Hall

A1ceo Galliera A1ceo Galliera

Ida Haendel 'iolin Ida Haendel ( iolinl

16 17 18 21

6.30 7 3 7

Sheffield Nottingham Southport Manchester

City Hall Albert Hall Garrick Theatre Albert Hall

A1ceo Galliera A1ceo Galliera A1ceo Galliera John Barbirolli

Ida Haendel iolin) Ida Haendel ( 'iolin Ida Haendel (Violin) Evelyn Rothwell

(Oboe) Wilfrid Parry (Piano)

25 7 Oldham Empire Theatre John Barbirolli Evelyn Rothwell (Oboe)

27 28 29 31

7.30 7.30 7.30 2.30

Belfast Belfast Belfast Dublin

King's Hall King's Hall King's Hall Theatre Royal

John Barbirolli John Barbirolli John Barbirolli John Barbirolli

Wilfrid Parry (Piano)

Sept, 1 2.30 Dublin Theatre Royal John Barbirolli Laurance T umer

5 2.45 Cheltenham Town HalJ John Barbirolli (Violin)

7.30 Cheltenham Town Hall John Barbirolli 6 3 Wells *Cathedral John Barbirolli Evelyn Rothwell

(Oboe) 7 Bristol Central Hall John Barbirolli

7 2.30 Bath The Pavilion John Barbirolli 7 Bristol Ce'ntral Hall John Barbirolli Edna Hobson

8 9

13

8 6.45

7

. Cardiff Swansea Rochdale

Empire Theatre Brangwyn Hall Champness Hall

John Barbirolli John Barbirolli Enrique Jorda

(Soprano)

Noel Mewton-Wood (Piano)

14 7 Sheffield City Hall Enrique Jorda Noel Mewton-Wood (Piano)

15 2.30 Chester Gaumont Theatre Enrique Jorda Noel Mewton-Wood (Piano)

17 18 19

t 7

7.30

Warrington Hanley Stockport

Parr Hall Victoria Hall Centenary Hall

Enrique Jorda Enrique Jorda Enrique Jorda Louis Kentner

21 22 25

7 t 7

Sheffield Llandudno Huddersfield

City Hall Pier Pavilion Town Hall

Enrique Jorda Enrique Jorda John Barbirolli

(Piano) Louis Kentner Louis Kentner

26 7 Halifax Victoria Hall John Barbirolli 27 6.30 Sheffield City Hall John Barbirolli Denis Matthews

28 7 Blackburn King George's Hall John Barbirolli (Piano)

* To be broadcast, t To be arranged,

II

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OXFORD MUSIC Arrangements by

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SHEEP MAY SAFELY GRAZE, from J. S. Bach's 'Birthday Cantata ', arranged for Small Orchestra. Score 4s. 6d.; Piano Conductor 2s.: Parts from 8d. each.

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