Concerts of the Week

Our young educational television station WGBH turned over its weekly program "Performance" on Monday evening to members of the Harvard Summer School Chorus for the second time. The resulting 50-minute concert, again under the expert leadership of Harold Schmidt, proved highly enjoyable if not quite up to the level of last summer's show. The shortcomings were due to two factors: Schmidt's essayal of more difficult music, and a less effective use of the television cameras.

The first half of the program, devoted to excerpts from Handel's Acis and Galathea, was musically first-rate. Handel was an infallible judge of what singers love to do and should be asked to do. This tale from Ovid was evidently a favorite with him, for he did three settings of it and even plagiarized from it for other works. Schmidt chose the second version with words by John Gay of Beggar's Opera fame. The charming soprano and tenor solos were beautifully handled by Sarah-Jane Smith and Antonio Giarraputo.

The group of Renaissance secular pieces fared moderately well. They have no accompaniment, and occasionally suffered from insecure pitch. Lassus' Mon coeur went too slowly for my taste; and Monteverdi's dramatic early Baroque madrigal Dorinda lay a bit high for the sopranos. Schmidt wisely used only an octet for Mauduit's Enparadis, a charming example of vers mesure, in which the musical rhythms follow those of the spoken text.

The novelty on the program was Kirk Mechem's amusing Rules for Behavior (1955). Effectively written, it shows much the same style and spirit as Irving Fine's Alice in Wonderland music. Also of recent vintage was "The Promise of Living" from Copland's opera The Tender Land. This warm work needs a slightly larger body of singers. The concert ended with Vaughan William's hearty Let All the World in Every Corner Sing, which wanted only a more robust accompaniment.

Schmidt is extremely telegenic and has good TV presence; and he provided brief but helpful commentary on each piece. Elaine Dowd (on short notice) and Polly Davis were the efficient accompanists.

Producer-director Ted Hoffmann's handling of the cameras was disappointing, compared with Ray Wilding-White's fine job last summer. We got only frontal views of portions of the chorus or rear views of Schmidt almost exclusively. Now this is precisely what we can see in any concert hall. What TV alone can do (and should have done) is to include plenty of side-view shots of the conductor, especially close-ups. Few things are more fascinating to watch than the face of a top-notch conductor at work.

Chamber Music Concert

Samuel Pepys, speaking of the recorder, wrote in his Diary, "the sound of it being, of all sounds in the world, most pleasing to me." He would have found further support for his conviction in the concert of Renaissance and Baroque chamber music presented before a capacity audience in Paine Hall on Tuesday evening.

The star of the program was Howard M. Brown. One of the supreme artists of our day on the modern flute, Brown demonstrated his versatility by performing with consummate skill on four diverse sizes of recorder as well as on an old wooden cross flute--all of which have utterly different playing techniques from the modern flute. The other musicians were Phyllis Olson, tenor and bass viola da gamba; and Daniel Heartz, harpsichord and lute.

Heartz' harpsichord playing had some rhythmic tentativeness and wrong notes, but was adequate on the whole. As soloist he played Byrd's showy Praeludium and jaunty variations on the folk tune The Carman's Whistle. But most intriguing was Hugh Aston's Hornepype, taken from the earliest source of English harpsichord music; this too was a set of variations--not on a tune, but rather on a repeated bass pattern. It is striking for its period in its unusual length, and in the fact that it has an ever-increasing intensity whereas most Renaissance pieces preserve their initial level throughout.

Of the group of seven dances and secular vocal pieces, most attractive was Non e tempo d'aspettare byMarco Cara, one of the chief musicians at Isabella's Mantuan court. It was played here by lute and viol. The performance of vocal pieces by an instrumental ensemble is a perfectly authentic Renaissance practice.

Most of the audience seemed amused at the frequent lute retuning forced on Heartz in this group of works. But this problem has always plagued lutanists. A Frenchman once remarked, "I have more trouble keeping my lute fit for playing than maintaining my whole stable of horses."

Brown was the superb soloist in two sonatas for recorder and basso continuo (viol and keyboard) by Handel and Telemann--the two competitors for the top Trendex rating when Bach was generally considered a negligible talent. The first movement of the Telemann was a good example of the Baroque convention of using descending chromatic scale fragments to express sadness. In both works, Miss Olson's viol was far too weak, although she was fine in her two solo recercadas by Ortiz. In Baroque music, the bass line cannot be too strong.

In the final work, Rameau's third Concert en trio, Brown fittingly used a wooden cross flute actually owned by Johann Quantz, the greatest Baroque flute virtuoso, and lent by the Boston Fine Arts Museum from its Mason Collection of Instruments. Its tone is uniquely mellow and velvety, and well points up the fact that in the arts there is no progress, but only change. No gain is made without an equal loss.

A word is due the special care spent on the printed program. The cover appropriately reproduced a lovely painting of a Renaissance singer, flautist and lutanist (which might have been identified as being by an anonymous French master c.1525 and now in the Harrach Gallery in Vienna). The composers dates were supplied; and on the back was a full dated list of the original sources for all the pieces (though Rameau's work was published, not in 1728, but in 1741).

A near-capacity crowd poured into M.I.T.'s huge new Kresge Auditorium last night for an organ recital by E. Power Biggs. The three-manual Holtkamp organ has just recently been installed. It is designed along Classical rather than Romantic lines, with all the pipes unenclosed. The instrument speaks with great clarity, although some of the ranks of reed pipes are harsh and unevenly voiced. The Auditorium itself is truly an acoustical marvel.

Biggs' program constituted a virtual historical survey of organ styles, going from the late 16th-century Byrd through Sweelinck, Louis Couperin, Bach, Handel, Soler, Schumann and Franck to Jehan Alain, who was tragically killed in his youth during World War II.

It is heresy around these parts to say so, but Biggs is far from the last word in organ playing. He approaches almost all pieces in the same way, and they come out with a universally choppy, detached phrasing. Muddy playing is a grievous sin; but Biggs goes to the other extreme with his constant staccato jabbing. It grates on the nerves, and after about 15 minutes I was yearning for some sustained chords and some smoothly flowing lines. He also often attacks the keyboard from such a height that he strikes neighboring notes.

In the Bach Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor Biggs employed at least four different phrasings for the same fugue subject. The Franck Prelude, Fugue and Variation is such a wandering piece that it is no wonder that Biggs lost his place. Perhaps his best playing of the evening came in the Schumann Canon in B Minor, where his crisp short attacks were appropriate.

As encores, Biggs played the celebrated Trumpet Voluntary commonly but erroneously attributed to Purcell, and one of Daquin's numerous sets of variations on French Noels. Would that Biggs tried to introduce fewer variations and more variation in his playing