Even Stravinsky fails to impress Guardian critic - archive

The charm of London is that there you can hear all sorts of things. Extremes meet here as they never do in the provinces. I had the good fortune the other day to hear the worst bit of alleged singing I have ever come across in the whole of my professional career. It was so utterly, hopelessly bad that one could not escape the absurd fascination of it. One simply sat there and wondered at the sublime lack of self-knowledge that made it possible for anyone with so little voice, so little training, and so little knowledge of singing to go upon a public platform. It is as if I, who have hardly had a paint-brush in my hands all my life, were to have the impudence to send a painting anywhere but to the Royal Academy.

It surely cannot have been as bad as this before the war. I take it that what has happened is that a number of young men who are genuinely fond of music, but whose vocal training was interrupted by the war, now feel reluctant to spend years in acquiring the technique of singing, and think that they can pull through by sheer intelligence. They deceive themselves sadly, even when they have the intelligence; and if their friends have any influence with them they should dissuade them from making such woeful public exhibitions of incompetence as we have had here once or twice lately.

It is some years now since Stravinsky gave us “Le Sacre du Printemps.” I have never heard it myself (my knowledge of his larger works extends only as far as “Petrouchka” and “The Nightingale”), but most of my friends who know it are doubtful about it. Since then he has produced a quartet that no one seems to have understood, and a few strange songs. Latterly he has become fascinated with ragtime and jazz. I have seen at a friend’s house two or three of his most recent manuscripts, and last week we had at the Aeolian Hall the first performance of his “Ragtime” - a work for a small orchestra of strings, wind, brass, and percussion.

Had we heard it at a kinema or in a restaurant we should have been mildly amused. Listening to it as a late work of Stravinsky’s, one could only feel that it is hardly worth the while of a man of original genius to be doing what at least a thousand other musicians in Europe could do equally well.

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