Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/727

Rh Mr Stokowsky was flat, stale, full of the most ridiculous exaggerations of forte and piano. The tone of the orchestra was stringy heavy and coarse throughout. The marvellous interstellar introduction was almost rhythmless. A terrible want of fineness was at play all the while.—But this is not what we came to say. What we have to say has to do neither with Mr Bodanzky's delicious genius for the inferior; nor with the insensibility of Mr Stokowsky. It has to do merely with the reports of the two concerts published by a certain critic, Mr X.

Mr X's report of the Pfitzner perpetration was marvellously evasive. He found the music "Impressive"—and added "that is the best one can say of most of the work," as though attributing impressiveness to a work were not doing a very great deal. Elsewhere, he called it "a mixture of good and bad," and then hastened to add "Pfitzner is at his best when he is working within limitations," by which almost Goethean phrase Mr X signified that "by far the most significant music in the score is that which is set to words. [The] choral writing is solid and idiomatic, and he [the composer] usually contrives to say his say through this medium with uncommon expressiveness and terseness. Perhaps the best bit of music in the score—is a lovely a capella setting" et cetera. Mr X also liked "his imitative moments, although pretty literal"; finding that "oboes and clarinets crow with diverting roosterish- ness at the line Wenn der Hahn kraeht auf dem Dache, and a passage descriptive of the stars rising over the sea is pricked out with a cheerful array of bright string pizzicati and little jets of woodwind fire." However, "Mr Pfitzner is not Wagner," and so on, all along the top of the fence. But if Mr Xs piece on the Bodanzky evening was a perfect evasion, his piece on the evening of the Philadelphia Orchestra was just as uncritical. Our friend found it difficult to write about the concert "for the simple reason that a couple of handsprings and three rousing cheers are about the most comprehensive expression of opinion" he found he could think of at the moment. "No orchestra in the world could possibly be as good as Mr Stokowski's sounded" that night. "The tone of the orchestra seemed pure molten gold most of the time, the sort of playing that would make any music sound well, let alone Schubert and Bach and Beethoven, and its response to the conductor was as perfect as its tone."