Scan 6
Musical Courier 1902-05-28: Vol 44 Iss 1157, 1902
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1alert, gave a fine performance of the overture to "Les Barbares," which opera was produced for the first time at the Paris Grand Opéra last fall. In London the overture, despite its brilliantly orchestrated coda, was received rather coldly.
3Ysaye then performed in magnificent style the Saint-Saëns B minor Violin Concerto. He is at his best and, in fact, absolutely inimitable in the delivery of such music and more especially of just this work. No one could have suspected that the artist had traveled all night, coming from Paris for the rehearsal and concert, so fresh and verveful was his playing. It was equally polished and pure in style and tone.
5Another Tchaikowsky symphony, the fourth, opened the second half of the program, which thus contained all the three last symphonies of the Russian master. The woodwind was coarse in this reproduction, compared with what Nikisch had done with them on Wednesday night.
7Ella Russell then sang the "Ocean" aria from Weber's "Oberon," with a passée voice no longer containing any quality. She made some efforts at dramatic delivery of this difficult excerpt, but did not reach far beyond the conventional, and was entirely lacking in imagination. An entr'acte from "Phryné" I found much more pretty music than the Overture to Saint-Saëns' latest opera, "Les Barbares." It is, besides, very French, both in character and coloring, and greatly pleased the audience. The musical climax, reached upon an impassioned phrase set to the words "Oui, je t'aime," would even have proved irresistible if only the composer had conducted it as he conceived it. Instead he acted like a metronome dressed up in a swallow tail coat with white choker.
9The festival closed befittingly with the work of an English composer. It was Elgar's genial "Cockaigne" Overture, which you also heard last winter in New York. The same composer's so far most important work, "The Dream of Gerontius," will be brought out at the next Netherhennish music festival at Düsseldorf, on Whit Monday, when I shall have a chance to harangue more at length upon the merits of this most promising among the younger English music creators. The "Cockaigne" Overture was superbly performed, and Dr. Elgar was called upon the platform by the public, which tendered a perfect ovation to him, as well as to the conductor, Mr. Wood.
11So pronounced has been the success of this London music festival that Robert Newman is already out with the announcement that he will give another one next year during the first week in May.
13Vivat sequens!
15The most important other musical event, besides the above described music festival, was the first appearance in public of a young English girl, Miss Mabel Monteith, whom I consider one of the pianistically most gifted and musically most talented débutantes I ever encountered in an experience of a quarter of a century. Miss Monteith is a born pianist, whose fingers seem to have been trained to such perfection that her technic is a wonder in the way of surety, flawlessness and brilliancy, and at the same time of rarest charm in tone, as well as power and endurance. These essentials—not only in the way of mechanical perfection, but also as far as variety of touch, refined sense of tone color, nicety and taste in shading of all sorts of nuances, from the most powerful ff to the most delicate pp is concerned—Miss Monteith possesses to a degree which is almost phenomenal in an artist so young and apparently so slight in physical appearance. They are supplemented, moreover, by a conception which combines the almost virile breadth needed for a satisfactory reproduction of that touchstone of musical intelligence and feeling, Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto, with the romantic spirit needed for a Rubinstein Concerto, and the dash and brilliancy of the pure virtuoso such as she displayed in the Liszt arrangement for piano and orchestra of Weber's E major Polonaise.
17The very fact that Miss Monteith chose the rarely heard G major Concerto, instead of the now nearly hackneyed D minor Rubinstein Concerto, also prepossessed me at once in her favor. In the first movement this work, barring a few spots of mediocre instrumentation, which could very easily be retouched by a good musician, beats the other one both in richness and value of ideas, and the other two movements are in no way musically inferior to those of the D minor Concerto. This work Miss Monteith also performed best of all, and it was received with such genuine enthusiasm by a large and cultured audience that after a triple recall Miss Monteith had to yield to an encore demand, choosing for it the Chopin A flat Waltz in double rhythm. After the Weber-Liszt "Polonaise" the same scenes were enacted, and if the enthusiasm that prevailed at the début is to be taken as a criterion for Miss Monteith's future career she will unquestionably turn out a "world beater," and may perhaps be or become the female pendant to Paderewski.
19Although Miss Monteith, at the age of twenty, has only
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