single predominantly sombre tone and colour. The first is jagged, terse, concentrated. The second, which is built about two climaxes, the one small and tightly held, the other large and extended, melts with lights of mournful passionate reverie and little human cries. And the third dances as steel and skyscraping stone might dance could they break their forms and clap their hands and lift their tenoned feet; and after a sort of melisma, it is as though a new quality of light, like dayshine after warm oppressive night, had been washed over the instruments, for the music subsides into c-major and closes released in the broad diatonic mode. The instruments themselves are treated as becomes the form of the quintette. The four strings are usually made to play as a single enormous fiddle against the piano. Only in the second movement does the quality of the music become preponderantly gossamer-like, do the voices of the individual strings open out and speak against each other. There are two very noteworthy concerted passages sul ponticello.
The work received a very dignified performance at the hands of Harold Bauer and the Lenox String Quartet. Bloch stands in the world of to-day much as Johannes Brahms stood in that of forty years since: for we know that whatever in the future comes from him must of necessity bear the firm imprint of grave spirit and musical masterhood.
And the Strawinsky pieces brought life likewise. If the quintette resembles some elaborate fresco, the coloured convolutions of a Delacroix, say, the capricious melodic lines for the single reed are comparable to a drawing of Picasso's; for with entirely dissimilar means both complete a form, and stand comparable. Petroushka and the Sacre have both demonstrated the perfectness with which, with a single unsupported instrumental voice, a snare-drum or reed, Strawinsky can fill a space; and these delightful grotesques illustrate anew the man's most subtle cunning. Each of the little musical moments sustains its lyrical momentum, and yet not a note comes premeditated; even the reiterations of single notes come as startling surprises. So originally indeed are the tones and phrases spaced and rested that one has the thrill had long ago when the prestidigitator drew forth from an innocent silk tile first a pack of playing cards, then several Easter eggs, and finally a
