# A Familiar Lament



## chill782002 (Jan 12, 2017)

I came across this in an old London periodical dedicated to classical music. The reviewer's lament speaks for itself and reflects a number of threads I've seen on this site, albeit at a distance of 70 years. I guess that this illustrates that nothing ever really changes. Who here would pass on the opportunity to have seen those conductors that he is somewhat dismissive of halfway through this excerpt?

_When one is very young there are few things more irritating than to be hounded by the voice of experience, or at least of experience greater than one's own. Twenty years ago I used to be told I ought to have heard Steinbach, Richter or Nikisch and that as I had not, I could not possibly understand the fundamentals or even grasp the rudiments of true orchestral music-making.

At the time I wrote most of this off as so much rose-tinted reminiscence. Now I suspect that most of my younger readers will write me off in much the same way.

The fact is, of course, that London's orchestral music in 1950 will not bear any kind of detailed comparison with what was provided in the middle and later thirties, and only ignorance or humbug can pretend that it will.

In those days we had Queen's Hall: today we have the Royal Albert, the charred and gutted shell of Queen's, a half-built hall next to Hungerford Bridge and the same few smaller halls apart from the best one, the Aeolian.

Among conductors Greenbaum, Harty, Heward, Kabasta, Weingartner and Wood are dead. Mengelberg has retired, and Beecham, Toscanini and Walter are all past their prime. One might be excused for thinking the same of Furtwängler, if his recent English performances represented his greatest achievements after the war.

Our orchestra players now enjoy greater material prosperity than ever before, and quite right too. But more money seems to have made some of them less co-operative, and the present general standard of craftsmanship among players leaves a great deal to be desired. Is there more than one horn-player in the country who can be relied on not to make a fool of himself and shatter the ensemble at any point where his instrument is called into play? Why do our violinists plague us with a scraping noise, as of tin fiddles with wire strings being tortured with abrasive bows? The wire E string I suppose we have to accept on practical grounds, but only the E string. The avoidance of sour wind intonation and ragged entries is more directly the responsibility of the conductor, and you will have noticed how some of the breed achieve much more in this respect than others._


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Interesting read, especially the last paragraph. Every generation looks with envy at previous eras, usually through rose-colored glasses. And every generation reflects with nostalgia for how great things were in their youth - usually mistakenly. Regarding the low quality of players: was this from 1950? If so, England really did have a problem - because of the war and the dire circumstances in the UK, the quality of their players was dramatically weakened. Read the books about Beecham or Sargent and finding good players was a struggle. Enticing a good player to quit his current job to take another was quite common.

Regarding the conductors, how many people really know who Greenbaum, Harty, Heward, Kabasta, Weingartner and Wood were? Weingartner maybe. I know of Kabasta only because of his Viennese roots. Wood is mostly known, if at all, for the Proms. Every generation has a lot of conductors who seem important at the time, but are soon forgotten. We are no better off; a lot of our current maestros and their fame will prove ephemeral. 

Who wrote that article? Is there a name?


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

I second the post above. British orchestras have since recovered; it was a real, but temporary setback.


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## chill782002 (Jan 12, 2017)

mbhaub said:


> Interesting read, especially the last paragraph. Every generation looks with envy at previous eras, usually through rose-colored glasses. And every generation reflects with nostalgia for how great things were in their youth - usually mistakenly. Regarding the low quality of players: was this from 1950? If so, England really did have a problem - because of the war and the dire circumstances in the UK, the quality of their players was dramatically weakened. Read the books about Beecham or Sargent and finding good players was a struggle. Enticing a good player to quit his current job to take another was quite common.
> 
> Regarding the conductors, how many people really know who Greenbaum, Harty, Heward, Kabasta, Weingartner and Wood were? Weingartner maybe. I know of Kabasta only because of his Viennese roots. Wood is mostly known, if at all, for the Proms. Every generation has a lot of conductors who seem important at the time, but are soon forgotten. We are no better off; a lot of our current maestros and their fame will prove ephemeral.
> 
> Who wrote that article? Is there a name?


The article was written by a gentleman named Geoffrey Sharp but I have sadly been unable to find any information on him. I agree with your point about every generation believing that things were better from a performance point of view in its youth or even prior to its coming into existence. The idea of Beecham, Toscanini, Walter and Furtwängler being "past their prime" seems incredible to us although Sharp was presumably just telling it as he saw it, while also admitting, to some extent, that he was simply falling into the same trap as those older than him who had seen Steinbach, Richter and Nikisch conduct and against whom, in their opinion, conductors in the 30s compared unfavourably. All three conductors have now been dead for 100 years or more and no recordings of them exist, apart from a small handful of acoustic recordings made by Nikisch near the end of his career, including the famous 1913 recording of Beethoven's Fifth. Unfortunately, acoustic recordings are not a good indication of how that conductor would have sounded with a full orchestra and so are not particularly useful for comparison purposes.

With regard to those conductors prominent in the 30s for whom Sharp appears to have such great affection, Weingartner is still reasonably well known, Harty and Wood less so outside the UK and Kabasta is largely forgotten, although the small number of recordings of him that exist suggest that Sharp's regard for him was well deserved. I wasn't aware that he had much of a reputation outside Germany and Austria though. Greenbaum and Heward are totally unknown to me.


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## chill782002 (Jan 12, 2017)

After some quick online research, it would appear that Hyam Greenbaum and Leslie Heward were both English conductors and that both died young, Greenbaum at 41 and Heward at 45. Greenbaum founded the BBC Television Orchestra in 1936 and Heward was the music director of the City of Birmingham Orchestra between 1930 and 1942, which makes him a musical forebear of Simon Rattle. Sir Hubert Parry described him as, "the kind of phenomenon that appears once in a generation". He also apparently conducted the first performance and recording of Moeran's Symphony in G minor, which I must admit I have not heard. I must try and discover whether any other recordings of him exist and also whether there are any extant recordings of Greenbaum.


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