"_)
I.
We had quite a hectic time at the Philharmonic--I nearly wrote the
Phillemonade--concert last night, what with two Czechs, Dabcik 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 _role_ 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.
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