Orchestral music in wartime was saved by a relatively small group of enthusiasts who cared more for music itself than for their own personal success. It was a hard struggle, which has been described elsewhere, and the enthusiasts were sustained only by their belief that, with the obstacles of war removed, a new, fruitful and progressive period of British musical history would open up to them. It will not be out of place to enquire to what extent these hopes have been fulfilled.

A Year ago in Oxford I met a South African Officer, who told me that he was about to return to Carinthia. I knew that the widow of Alban Berg had a house near Klagenfurt and I asked him to visit her and take her my greetings.

Shortly afterwards I received a letter from the officer. He had seen Frau Berg and she was so excited to meet an officer of the Army of Liberation that she had unearthed one of Alban Berg's manuscripts, which she had hidden away, and presented him with it, asking that it should be handed to me to present to the University as a sign of her gratitude.

It is nearly twenty years since the performance of ‘Psalmus Hungaricus’ in Gloucester Cathedral awakened English singers and their audiences to the existence of Zoltán Kodály and induced a considerable number besides I.S.C.M. adherents to place his name on their musical map of Europe. It was not a matter of general sympathy for the Hungarian loss of three million Magyars under the treaty of Trianon, or even of polite interest in the Jubilee celebrations of the union of Buda and Pesth which had occasioned the production of the work in 1923. In forming musical inclinations the English do not think much of revisionist movements, least of all in the Shires. All the same, it was fitting that singers whose oratorio tradition had been closely bound up with the forms of Italian and German opera and the literary devotion of the English School should turn for a change to a fresh and intensely national sphere of influence by way of freshening their religious repertoire.

The Trustees of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, have issued a statement outlining their future plans, particularly with regard to opera. In the résumé given below the remarks in brackets should be read as Editorial comment.

Nearly all our famous composers have now seen their names blazoned across the ‘credit titles’ of what America calls ‘motionpictures.’ The plot may be moronic, the dialogue the most basic English, but the music may now scale the Olympian heights of classical austerity, or plumb the mazy depths of atonality and every other form of modern anti-romanticism. Gone are the days when studios shunned doctors of music like straphangers dodge the passenger sneezing in a tube. Counterpoint is no longer contraband, nor fugue verboten, a man may make a canon without being fired.

Writing about ballet in a musical review I venture to choose among recently created ballets only those in which music and dance are most strikingly interwoven. I shall, therefore, by-pass Robert Helpmann's sensational monument of stagecraft, ‘Adam Zero,’ and come at once to Frederick Ashton's ‘Symphonic Variations,’ which caused another kind of sensation by its startling economy of means and overwhelming impression of beauty.

The six weeks' visit of the American Ballet Theatre to Covent Garden, commencing July 2, is a rare event for balletomanes. The Ballet Theatre has won its place during the war years as the foremost American dancing company, giving lengthy seasons at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring and autumn, and undertaking important tours in many parts of the United States. It should not be confused with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo or the Russian Ballet Company, both of which have been playing in America since they were last seen in England before the war.