I.
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.