Theatre Concerto Grosso, -Porpora-Gui 2nd movement from the Znd symphony "A song of summer: Prelude and love-death eceng from "Pristan"...
Symphony in A nicely varied programme pleasantly played sums up the 13th concert of the season. "Two works were unfamiliar and both of them were very enjoyable. First "A Song of Summer," which turned out to be fairly typical and therefore good Delius. Written in one movement (though the term is misleading because of its connotations of specific form) this work is in length just slightly longer than "On Hearing the First Cuckoo." It was composed round 1910. More interesting was the Concerto Grosso. The orchestrator, Vittorio Gui, a contemporary Italian composer has taken as his basis a lively sonata in three movements by Porpora, who lived from 1686 to 1766. In the expanded version the three instruments of the original, two violins and a cello, are retained as leading instruments. The work is a pleasant adaptation of classical musical thought to a setting that is modern but not aggressively so. Porpora is more noteworthy as a singing teacher than as a composer. In the former role he is said to have been the greatest ever.
Hardy Perennials Of the two hardy perennials which completed the first half the Wagner was the better performed. Of all the Wagner excerpts which are in the orchestra's repertoire this one probably suffers least from treatment by a small orchestra. The "Andante con more" from Mahler's 2nd symphony received the usual too slow and rather over-sentimental rendering: one that is foreign to its purpose in the symphony. But the obvious retort is that it was played out of its context and therefore the limits of good interpretation may be more elastic. And there is some. thing in that.
The symphony was as pleasing as it should be. Musicians may point to its technical defects as much as they wish but they cannot deny the beauty that has made its popularity so permanent—c.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.