MUSICAL CHRONICLE
HAD the Bloch piano quintette and the three pieces for clarinet by Strawinsky been left alone to comprise the first programme of the first season of the League of Composers, one would not have hurried from the Klaw Theatre the evening of the concert under a pall of exasperation. The entertainment might possibly have appeared short, skimpy, and fearfully chaste. Nevertheless, the unaccompanied presentation of the Bloch and the music of the master of the unexpected would have sent one away refreshed, and spared one the most horrid of sensations: that which accompanies the shaving down of an impulse pricked freshly up from life.
For both the quintette and the three little pieces for the reed instrument advance the art of music. It is possible that Ernest Bloch has put himself into other of his works more hotly, more passionately, more completely, than into the quintette. No work of his, nevertheless, is better formed, and more classical in design than the new composition; or reveals more fully the maturity of the artist. The quintette is at once very simple, very large, and very firm in outline. Like the other of Bloch's works, this streams rich with barbarous stuffs and colours. The rude and leonine themes, the penetrating melancholy voluptuousness, or voluptuous melancholy, one knows not which, of the suite and the sonata have been given blood brothers throughout the three movements. In the opening movement, the viola plays quarter tones. In the finale, there are themes which stood in a book about the country of the Amazon once placed in the hands of the small Ernest Bloch in Geneva, and which slipped from his memory, and suddenly mysteriously reappeared upon him in Cleveland while he was in the process of composing his new work. Throughout the three movements, there is the breath of the ritual of an uncaucasian Venus. Still, there is a new transparency and severity in the form and a new length and hardness in the line. The thematic material is very economically employed; the chief angular theme of the first movements becomes the basis for the second, and reappears in the finale. The three movements are well contrasted within the limits of a
