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It is rather surprising that neither of his recent performances in Manchester should have included any example of Beethoven, of whose greater Sonatas Mr. Lamond is now probably the best living interpreter, with the possible exception of Mr. Busoni. He was of course quite right to play plenty of Liszt, but it may be regretted that he gave so much of the later Liszt--who, conscious of himself as the world-famous magician of the piano, often improvised on rather poor themes, as if to show that any theme, however weak, could be made interesting by his transcendental style of ornamentation--rather than the earlier Liszt who wrote things of such power and eloquence as the
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Mazeppa Etude. Mr. Lamond's mind seems recently to have been running on Liszt's Tarantelle Fantasias. He played the
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Venezia e Napoli Tarantelle at the Hallé Concert and the
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Muette de Portici Tarantelle yesterday--both pieces which are chiefly of interest as proving that Liszt could improvise effectively upon any conceivable sort of thematic material. It would have been much more interesting to hear the
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Mazeppa, which Mr. Lamond played in the composer's presence and to his evident satisfaction when last he was in London, a few months before his death in 1886, or some piece in that pregnant early manner. His best performance yesterday was in Chopin's A flat Polonaise--a composition of such excellence that, hackneyed as it is, it cannot in a good rendering fail to give pleasure. Mr. Lamond did full justice to the majestic beauty of the themes, which are all absolutely good, and brought out the famous _basso ostinato_ section in some respects better than we have heard it done since Rubinstein's death. He did not adopt any of the revised versions of the left-hand octave passages favoured by certain distinguished modern performers. On the other hand, he did adopt Rubinstein's version of the ending, with the unexpected and telling chord of C major just before the final phrase. In Rubinstein's F minor Barcarolle--so interesting in rhythm, so original in colouring--Mr. Lamond was not entirely successful, his temperament apparently not furnishing a key to the vein of lyrism in which the piece is conceived. Yet in Liszt's
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Liebestraum he was perfect, though one might have expected that his Beethovenish tastes would have rebelled against the hothouse atmosphere of the composition. The opening performance of Schumann's
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Carnaval was powerful and distinguished, but too broad in style to be in keeping with the sub-title
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Scènes mignonnes.