Lily Dumont and the HRO

Miss Lily Dumont's performance of Beethoven's fourth piano concerto last Friday demonstrated nicely how amatcurish professionals can be. With the collusion of Henry Swoboda's ill-prepared orchestra, she made the Beethoven as uninteresting as Czerny--and sloppily played Czerny at that. From the first, she failed to make notes sound clearly. Sensing that she ought to change the pedal after once plumping it down, Miss Dumont tried to compensate for the lack of footwork by wildly revolving her shoulders. Eventually, when she did clear the pedal, she revealed her right and left hands engaged in a bit of polyphony never heard in this concerto. And in the final movement the orchestra aped and even extended Miss Dumont's lack of co-ordination.

Miss Dumont's bungling--bumpy scales, sloppy arpeggios--in the filler passages might have been dismissed if something like artistry had survived elsewhere. But Miss Dumont has been on four successful European tours, and being out of the country so much, she naturally has not had time to learn about that musical structure called the phrase. Melodies and display passages suffered the same degrading machinations; Miss Dumont banged out the notes with no regard for their form.

The HRO had less than a week in which to rehearse the Beethoven; it is unfortunate that it chose a soloist who took just as long to learn her part.

Swoboda's treatment of Brahms' Symphony No. 2, in D major, was far happier. The symphony, pastoral in mood, abounds in lyrical songs and placid melodies. Brahms provokes these tunes to passion or to jubilation, depending on their humor.

Despite a slightly slow start, the first movement did not drag under Swoboda's baton, and the orchestra produced sounds with shapes totally absent in the performance of the Beethoven. The orchestra had a few problems: the strings sounded a little thin and scattered in the extreme upper register during the fourth movement, while the low woodwinds occasionally picked the wrong notes. But Swoboda and the orchestra did capture the excitement and variety of the larger forms within each movement, and the Brahms, which ended the program, mitigated the effects of the Beethoven.

The opening work of the program, Hindemith's Nobilissima Visione, left absolutely no taste at all: it was just another work from the Hindemith grab-bag, competently performed. The suite contains five selections from an unsuccessful ballet which Hindemith began in 1919 on a commission from Diaghilev. The ballet lay unfinished after the death of Diaghilev until Hindemith completed it with Massine in 1937; the ballet failed a year later. The three movements of the present are all typified by the concluding Passacaglia, which consists of nineteen variations on a six-measure theme. Here Hindemith blurs the distinction between economy of musical material and paucity of thought; loud brass saying the same thing a dozen or so times hardly titillates the sensibilities.

In his performance of the Brahms, Swoboda has shown his capacity to make the orchestra handle difficult material well; if he will now add consistency to such quality, he will make the orchestra worth hearing.