Music in Turkey

Extract

Turkey has now had four Anglo-Turkish Music Festivals in Ankara, organised by the British Council and the Turkish Ministry of Fine Arts. The first of these (1948) and the fourth (1951) I had the pleasure of conducting.

Perhaps because of her distance from England, it is frequently not realised to what extent Turkey has advanced musically during the relatively brief space of time that she has been developing on Western musical lines. There are only two Symphony Orchestras in Turkey, at Ankara and at Istanbul, and both these are composed almost entirely of Turkish musicians. The Presidential Philharmonic Orchestra at Ankara is over seventy strong, and also provides the nucleus for the Radio Orchestra and the Opera Orchestra. For the Festival, seven rehearsals were allowed for each concert, and these were of course necessary to assimilate what were almost all new works to the repertory of the Orchestra, including Vaughan Williams' Job, Richard Arnell's Piano Concerto and Alan Rawsthorne's Symphonic Studies, quite apart from new Turkish works, which I will refer to later. The quality of orchestral playing is reasonably high, by any standard; there is a very pleasant warm string tone, and the principal woodwind players are truly excellent, the brass section is quite reliable, and I was particularly struck by the playing of the first horn.