With the final Festival of Britain concert, given in Leeds on Saturday night, came also the end of the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra’s fourth year. After a Third Programme broadcast with the Leeds Philharmonic Society in a Delius concert next Friday, the orchestra will take a well-earned rest before embarking on their fifth winter season.
Perhaps it was the sentiment traditionally associated with such occasions, rather than remorse or repentance, that brought so many people to the Town Hall. In any case, this was the largest audience of these British Music concerts, and there was no lack of enthusiasm. Only one of the four items played called for special concentration on the part of the listener – Vaughan Williams’s Concert for two pianos in which the dazzling soloists were Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick. Vaughan Williams has been much in our thoughts recently. We have seen that when he writes “Job” it is not a ballet but a masque. When he writes “The Pilgrim’s Progress” it is not an opera but a morality. Similarly, only the most innocent listener would expect this Concerto to follow conventional lines.
Dramatic power
The chromaticism and occasional unrelenting dissonance may fall strangely upon inexperienced ears; but it is not to the composer’s purpose here to use the solo instruments for cursive or lyrical effects. We have instead dramatic power; the impact of hammers on strings, to carry an incisive compelling musical argument that has some affinity with the Fourth Symphony. There is, however, an enchanting middle movement, a Romanza, that can hardly be a stumbling-block to any listener.
Dissonance also occurs in Berkeley’s Serenade for Strings, though its effect is not so aggressive in the smooth, unchanging texture that string-writing affords. This is a work of extreme origin, that is both witty and charming.
The concert had opened in stirring fashion with Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary, in which John Mason was the expert soloist. It closed with an impassioned, spacious performance of Elgar’s second Symphony, a work which, if out of temper with present-day England, at least proves that one of our composers could fashion from the 19th century musical vocabulary an English accent both new and startling.
ERNEST BRADBURY
Yorkshire Post