DECEMBER 1931

THE GRAMOPHONE

253

experience in every aspect of life has always been common experience. That I have had the good fortune to enjoy a certain amount of peculiar experience may be true; but I should never have appreciated that peculiar experience unless I had turned aside to i t from the main road, and unless I were able to find my way back to the main road again and go marching along i t until I had found an opportunity for another peculiar experience. In old days i t used to be impossible to walk over Westminster Bridge without meeting a white horse, and I venture to think that i t would be just as impossible nowadays to walk over vVestminster Bridge without meeting one person who at some t ime in his life had not bought a record of Handel's Largo. Consequently there is always a sale for a new rendering of the Largo, and those who suffer from re-duplications of i t are not the dealers, but the artists Rnd the recording companies themselves. At the same t ime you can hardly expect any recording company to establish a prescriptive right to be the only company to publish a version of Handel's Largo. Moreover, there is always a chance of variety on the other side, and a choice of any particular version of the Largo by the average purchaser will probably be dictated more by what is on the other side of the disc than by the superlative qualities of anyone version.

The wider the circulation of the paper in which I am writing the more letters I receive from lunatics, or to put i t another way, the more letters I receive from lunatics, the wider I may feel sure is the public to which I am appealing; but i t would be an unnecessary distrust of my own writing to suppose that I was under any obligation to write specially for lunatics. The recording companies regard letters from people asking them to record recherche works of music much as I regard the letters of lunatics. The B.B.C. is the only large concern which Hatters }unatics by replying to their letters or printing them f n the Radio Times.

Surely the issue of the CLonnoisseur catalogue by H.M.V. is a great opportunity for those five hundred dealers equal in intelligence to pimself, in whose existence Mr. Brayne so generously believes, and I should very much like to know whethe1 duplications of better known works or first recor~ings of comparatively unknown works will have the wider circulation. In our October number Mr. Peter Latham wrote with the greatest enthusiasm of the performance by the Budapest String Quartet of the First Rasoumovsky Quartet (F major, Op. 59, No.1) on four black discs in an album. I should like to echo every word he said in praise of this performance, the beauty of which is equalled by the excellence of the recording. Yet we already have the Columbia version of this quartet played by the Lener combination, and that too was, in i ts own style, an admirable performance. Clearly at a t ime of financial difficulty there will be even less people than usual ready to invest in a second version of this quartet, and the only chance of obtaining a sale that will reward everybody concerned in this

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splendid performance is to extend the appeal of chamber mUSIC.

The B.B.C. has done a great de.al for orchestral music; but i t has almost ruined the chance of selling records of chamber music to any except those who' already know i ts pleasures. I t was an act of stupidity' bordering upon criminality which permitted the broad c cast of ultra-modern cat's-cradle quartets and trios under the t i t le of chamber music. They should have been called modern or contemporary music. Chamber music should never have been used except to describe a concert of the simplest Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven trios and quartets. The absence of any proper- impresario at Savoy Hill is the cause of half the silly criticism Wireless programmes receive in the Press and elsewhere_ It is the presentation of the programme that wants improving, not the programme itself. " This evening," says the Announcer, " we are to ltave a short programme of modern chamber music. First we are to hear Hubbelbubbel's Quintet in C minor, for oboe and strings_ The first movement: Allegro accelerato molto desesperato. The second movement: Adagio aux fines herbes. The third movement: Continuando un poco costivo. The fourth movement: Andante terrificamente gassoso." Then the listeners who have survived what sounds to most of them like a superior young man trying to show off his Italian iIi. a restaurant, hear what they think at first is a cat-fight in the garden, but which on looking in the Radio Times they Hnd is authoritatively printed as chamber music. Then they turn off the wireless and do a crossword puzzle until i t is t ime for Jack Payne to come on.

Some of you may remember that among the music chosen by "Working Lad" was the Cortot Trio playing Schubert's Trio No.1 in B flat, Op. 99. This is what he says about i t :

" Now as regards the gift records from whom? I thank them, I did not think I was really ordering chamber music in the trio set, I had heard and l iked i t , and much wanted i t , should i t ever come in my power, but honestly I did not think I was picking the fruits from the top of the tree, I thought I was somewhere about half-way sort of thing, to put i t in a nut shell, i t is to me too high class (chamber music) but not so now that I have ventured. No longer has i t the style of Chamber of Horrors to a nervous person. I have often wondered what the Trout Quintet was l ike that you spoke or wrote (as I should say) about so much in trying to convert lLS, I have been converted innocently whilst I was going in for good high-class music not the chamber class, but nevertheless I have had i t on several t imes which speaks for i tself, I think Anyhow I am going to approach my dealer concerning a hearing of the Trout Quintet." ,

No,v there is a perfect example of the harm done by letting the public get into their heads, as he said, that chamber music is a kind of chamber of horrors. One day I am going to ask the B.B.C. to allow me to present a programme of chamber music in my own way, and I will bet the B.B.C. four free talks against four talks at double fees that I will get more letters from people telling me that they have enjoyed my programme than letters they get abusing their programmes, of modern chamber music.