We had quite a hectic time at the Philharmonic--I nearly wrote the
Phillemonade--concert last night, what with two Czechs, Dabçik and
Ploffskin, slabs of WAGNER, and Carl Walbrook's Humorous Variations,
"The Quangle Wangle," conducted by Carl himself. If the honest truth be
told, we sat down to the Variations with no more pleasurable
anticipation than one sits down with in the dentist's chair, preparatory
to the application of gags, electric drills and other instruments of
odontological torture. (Strange, by the way, that no modernist has
translated the horrors of the modern Tusculum into terms of sound and
fury!) But we were most agreeably surprised to find ourselves following
every one of the forty-nine Variations with breathless interest. Mr.
Walbrook is indeed a case of the deformed transformed. We found hardly a
trace of the poluphloisboisterous pomposity with which he used to
camouflage his dearth of ideas. His main theme is shapely and sinuous,
and its treatment in most of the Variations titillated us voluptuously.
But, since it is the function of the critic to criticise, let us justify
our _rôle_ by noting that the scoring throughout tends to glutinousness,
like that of the pre-war Carlsbad plum; further, that a solo on the
muted viola against an accompaniment of sixteen sarrusophones is only
effective if the sarrusophones are prepared to roar like sucking-doves,
which, as LEAR would have said, "they seldom if ever do." Still, on the
whole the Variations arrided us vastly.
It was a curious but exhilarating experience to hear the Bohemians, the
playboys of Central Europe, interpreted in the roast-beef-and-plum-pudding
style of the Philharmonic at its beefiest and plummiest. Dabçik survived
the treatment fairly well, but poor Ploffskin was simply stodged under.
But they were in the same boat with RICHARD the Elder, whose Venusberg
music was given with all the orgiastic exuberance of a Temperance Band
at a Sunday-School Treat, recalling the sarcastic jape of old HANS
RICHTER during the rehearsal of the same work: "You play it like
teetotalers--which you are not." Yet the orchestra were lavish of
violent sonority where it was not required; the well-meaning but
unfortunate Mr. Orlo Jimson, who essayed the "Smithy Songs" from
_Siegfried_, being submerged in a very Niagara of noise. WAGNER'S
scoring no doubt is "a bit thick," but then he devised a special
"spelunk" (as BACON says) for his orchestra to lurk in, and there is no
cavernous accommodation at the Queen's Hall.