It is often assumed that, if one objects to certain broadcasting, it is always easy to plug out. Nothing of the kind: as I found on a recent Sunday morning, when in a home not my own, I was conventionally compelled to listen to all the horrors of Radio Paris on a 'set' tuned to emulate the braying of an ass. I took a new-year's resolution never again to listen in to anybody or anything, but my selfdenying ordinance failed me when I saw that Dr Adrian Boult was to begin a broadcast of the great Busoni, for such he will be called by those who are acquainted with his masterpiece, the opera, Dr Faust: on the completion of which he died [1]. Those also will acclaim him great who know him through his edition of the Forty-eight, or his adaptations to the piano of Bach's most wonderful organ works.

The profundity of Busoni's mind seemed in a fair way to be acknowledged when in 1920 he was appointed to the chair of composition at the Berlin Academy of Arts, but there were those who could not brook the presence of a Tuscan in Prussia.

The works performed under Dr Adrian Boult date from Busoni's earliest years. The delightful Comedy overture is some thirty years old [actually 35 - composed 1897 - MM]. The violin concerto, played magnificently by Szigeti [2], was written when the composer was thirty three, and the Turandot suite came to us some years before Puccini also was inspired by Gozzi's tragedy. Listening to the broadcast, I seemed to be in the presence of a new master in the realm of invention, one whose melodies have a sympathetic Bach-like contour, and whose method of development and masterly orchestration is entirely his own. The dialogue quality of his violin concerto gives it kinship with the comprehension of an unusually powerful drama. Nowhere in the programme was the dramatic sense more convincing or absolute than in the Turandot suite, each movement of which is a miniature masterpiece.

I have not yet appeared before the 'mike', and my attendance at the receiver is fitful and fretful. However, I did get on to Basle successfully the other night and picked up the Beethoven programme by the Concert Orchestra under Felix Weingartner. It was superbly done, and included a beautiful performance of the Violin Concerto by a local artist vice a singer indisposed. Next night, Stuttgart gave me gramophone records: so I got back into Switzerland and from Zurich, inter alia, heard Gaspar Cassado play Dvorak's violoncello concerto, his elegant and refined playing reminding me of Suggia.

I fear the Editor will cut short my further meanderings in Alsace or Switzerland, so I will get over the Alps and down to Naples, where at San Carlo they were doing that wonderful vocal symphony known as Tristan and Isolde, only they were still retaining the singers, who were superb. What an experience it would be to hear this work for once without the singers! In no other opera did Wagner lavish such love on the orchestra, particularly on woodwind and horns, which came through with entrancing clearness. On another occasion, from Rome, I heard a selection from Boris Godounoff, which I followed with the Oxford Press edition before my eyes, only to find that the 'cuts' were considerable. What impressed me most was the ease of the Italian singers, and particularly the nonchalant manner in which the Dmitri took his highest notes.

In a recent radio paragraph I spoke of hearing from Rome Malipiero's Sette canzoni, for soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists and orchestra. To my great pleasure, Chester's, the English publishers of Malipiero's works, gave me an opportunity of studying this unusual sequence of songs [3]. They are by no means milk and water, for Malipiero's impressionism has a sharp and bitter flavour which fixes one's attention. He is a somewhat solitary figure in Italy, and has in his nature and work much that is akin to his sixteenth century countryman, Monteverdi.

(1) In fact, the opera was still unfinished at his death and completed the following year by his pupil Philipp Jarnach; there is an alternative completion by Anthony Beaumont.

(2) Szigeti eventually recorded Busoni's concerto in 1954, with the Little Orchestra conducted by Thomas Scherman: this excellent performance continues to circulate, most recently as far as I am aware in a Sony 'Masterworks Portrait' disc coupled with Busoni's Second Violin Sonata.

(3) Unusual indeed, in that Sette canzoni is actually catalogued among Malipiero's stage works, a sequence of seven mini-operas in song form (themselves comprising the middle panel of his operatic trilogy L'Orfeide).