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The Gramophone , May, 1927

violin t one pretty true, as anything could be. On the other hand I went wearily through the whole twelve Leners and found all hollow, nearly as bad as the single movement of the Tchaikovsky which was r ecorded in the same Wigmore Hall . I can't make th e violin tone anything like true and a suspicion tha.t the land line is all wrong , and emphasises the middle register, would seem to be confirmed by the bct that for the first t ime the viola and second violin come into their own, which they never do in the actual performance of the Lener. Then I get my GRAMOPHONE and r ead that" P. L ." thinks the recording almost ideal and superior to the Virtuo so. True he arrives at his conclusions with an H.M.V. cabinet and loud steel needles, while I used a big horn and fibres, but I feel certain that no sted needle could make me think the L ener records sound lill;e a s tring quartet and when someone at Frith Street put 011 a Virtuoso r ecord with a Petmecky or what ever they are called I asked them for pity's sak e to take i t off. I t can 't be m erely cussedness, but " P. L." is pres umably a musician and I have been going to quartet r ecita ls for about thirty years, so obviously one of us is a case for an am·jst. I heard the Flol1zaley playing B ee thoven's Op. 95 the other night and i t sounded as different as possible to the Lener's version and" .Q. " who was in a seat near by was eloquent on the subject. He opines that the Lener are "sweetly pretty but not Beethoven," a.nd a t tributes their success to fashion a.nd social causes evidenced by the circumstance that audiences at the Queen 's Hall concerts were composed of nine-tenths women. I think you are absolutely right in ehastising those who attribute lack of success in the coneert world to the wireless craze. Can you conceive anyone who is a potential concert goer being content with hearing i t on tbe wireless ins/ead ? I b elieve i t is simply inability to give us wh a t we want th a t is a,t tbe bottom of the fa.i.lures. They try to please too IIlan y tastes at once and m a ke the concerts far too long . HaH t he bean ty of qnartet recitals i s that you know there will be no t hing to make you almo st sick. Three perfect works, perfectly played, giving y on abou t one and tbree-quarter bours' music send you bome far more satisfied and happy than three or four hours of long drawn-out apprehension as to wh a t you will b e l istening to n ex t. Things as encores wbich were cven too awful to put down on the programme. Drivel by t in-pot British composers who ought to be· playing football or cricket. 'rake the N. G.S. r ecords which I have just played over, a b eautiful l i t t le thing of Mozart's, quite a l i t t le gem. Tbat Corelli piece, and th en D elius and Warlock. Both merely favoura,ble sp ecimen s of modern things, but Warlock's might just as well be called " Summer Night on tbe River" as the ot h er, and both sound to m e like the sort of music any capable musically minded man might improvise for bis oV',rn enjoym ent a nd which might go on for ever, never actually saying any thing.

These two letters, which I select from sev era] others recently received, demand some attempt on my part to provide an answer. I take a good deal of pleasure in printing them, because I think they will help to bring home to many of our readers the difficulties under which our reviewers labour.

FiI'st of all with regard to the complaint about cramping the space for reviews every month. I t must be remembered that the readers of this paper represent a very elastic standard of musical taste. Some of them have no musical taste at all; many others have much better musical taste than I have myself, better taste than I ever expect to acquire unless I live far beyond the allotted span. Oonsequently I have from the very first numbers made i t my policy as Editor to meet as far as possible the extremely various demands of our public. So far a,s expert musical criticism is concerned I have no> hesitation in saying that our reviewers are as repre~ sentative a body of critics as could be found in Great Britain. On the other hand, since not 000 of them really knows anything at all about the gramophone, we have had to gather together another set of critics who do know a great deal about the gramophone, but for wh-ose perfect musical taste neither they nor we are prepared to vouch. In between these two sets of experts is myself, and i f I may seem too much of a " Jack of all trades and a m a ster of none," that is after all exa ctly what 75 per cent. of my readers are. I am always willing to outrage the feelings of both sets of experts, because i t i s only by outraging the feelings of experts that one can prevent criticism's degenerating into complacency. During the last year the astonishing developments already achieved by new record.ing have made the business of record criticising twenty t imes as difficult as i t was. I rather wonder i f the revolution is yet a,ppreciated in all i ts implications by the majority of . our readers. I doubt i t . The attention we have lately been giving to radio is not in the least a sign that we are trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, as some of our protestants seem to think. Weare all chasing the same old hare we have been chasing for so many years-the hare of musical reproduction. I can perfectly well understand the conservative point of view which says" I prefer the old style of recording and the old style of instrument and the sound-box that my father loved"; but such conservatives are well catered for by our contemporaries. We may perhaps make the mi stakes of enthusiastic radicals r but in making these mistakes we show that we have a vitality which no mass of conservative opinion can dare to claim for itself, whether that conserva­

t ive opinion be a government or a collection of gramophiles. The new wine demands new bottles. I t may be t hat the Panatrope is a clumsy kind of new bottle, but I need hardly remind people that all mechanical progress is a progress from the complicated way of obt aining something new to the simple way of obtaining something better. I am perfectly sure tha,t 80 per cent. of the people who own Panatropes h aven't the least idea how to use them. I am equally convinced that 80 per cent. of the people who buy the latest records have not a notion how to extra ct the best results from them, even under present conditions. I might feel shaken in my conviction that the next two or three years will show as great an advance in the instruments of reproduction a s the last year has shown in the quality of the recorded music, if my opinion did not coincide with the opinion of Mr. Virtz. Mr. Virtz has proved to me that the claims he makes for his old-style sound-boxes are justified. Only last week he sent me a specially designed orchestral sound-box which is as great an improvement on any