THINGS TO COME A Run Through The Programmes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 54, 5 July 1940, Page 6

THINGS TO COME

A Run

Through The Programmes

LREADY well on the way on its tour of A provincial centres, the group of musical celebrities will be in Invercargill on Tuesday and Wednesday, July 9 and 10, and Station 4YZ will broadcast both concerts on relay from the Civic Theatre. In each case, all four artists will sing, and will be supported by the Centennial String Quartet, with Clifford Huntsman at the piano. We are also now able to announce that arrangements have been made for the touring party to add Hawerd to their ports of call. The Hawera concert will be given on July 16. Over and Round One of the urgent problems facing the infant settlement of Port Nicholson one hundred years ago was to find more land that could be worked relatively easily. The Wairarapa Valley attracted attentién before long. A way was found over the mountains at the head of the Hutt Valley, but this was too roundabout, and the settlement was faced with the problem of access. The pioneers drove their sheep round the bays of the har-

bour, and at one point the sheep had to be carried one by one. Then came the settlement of Greytown, Masterton, and Featherston by way of a track, and subsequently a road over the Rimutakas. The story is to be told in a series of three talks from 2YA on successive Sunday afternoons, beginning on July 7 at 3 p.m. The first two will be about the settlement of the Wairarapa, and the third will be an account of the conditions under which the pioneering women lived in that district and elsewhere. Us The lively round-table discussion at 3YA about the effect of Europe’s overflow on new countries has reached the end of the nine-

teenth century, and will shortly be dealing with prospects of to-day. The discussion has been exceptionally candid in its treatment of mistakes made in New Zealand by settlers and others, sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes out of selfishness. Too many people regarded the country as an estate to be exploited to the full in the shortest possible time, without regard to posterity. One of the many questions that arises is what have we developed in ourselves. What sort of people are we, and have we evolved a type of our own? These questions are to be considered in the round-table session at 3YA on Wednesday, July 10, at 7.32 p.m. Mystery Dunedin’s 4YA has been very mysterious lately. The whole staff has been worried. Everyone has wanted to know how you made club. It does sound funny, you must admit. But there it was. Every Saturday at five o'clock: "How to Make Club," the programmes said. Bill raised his head from licking stamps to suggest that there was no harm in teaching the kids how to make clubs; they might as well start hitting each other over the head now, since they'd all be doing it sooner or later. However, this theory was not widely accepted. Afraid to show our ignorance by asking 4YA for an explanation, we sat on the mystery and find it solved at last, If you look in the 4YA programmes this week, for Saturday, July 13, at 5 p.m., you will find that it is not, after all, a mutual suicide club but a "How to Make" Club; and everyone will be all the happier for that small change in the placing of the quotes. Spanish Stage Shakespeare, Dante, Homer-with these ‘great names competent critics bracket the plays of Pedro Calderon de la Barca (16001681), a Spanish playwright whose "Mayor of Zalamea" is to be broadcast by 1YA on Sunday, July 7, at 9.15 p.m. A famous English critic, in fact, claims that Calderon’s poetry was as pure as Shakespeare’s, and that he exceeded Shakespeare in stage effect. Listeners will not be able to judge his poetry in this play, for it is presented in English prose, but they may gain some idea of his stagecraft. In his own life Calderon mixed religion and fighting and dreaming, and in his plays there is much of this same mixture of characteristics, almost as if Barrie and Edgar Wallace had combined to write a play about mur-

der and mysticism. Although this play has been selected as representative of the dramatic literature of old Spain, it is actually only part of such a great literary output that the amount of Calderon’s work has never been accurately reckoned. Life on the Ice Mark Twain announced his pride in a piece of fine writing about the desolation and enmity of nature in the Polar regions; but not without later admitting his error in assuming that the cold lands were necessarily unfriendly. Modern explorers talk of "The friendly Arctic," and authorities like Stefansson show that men who know how can make themselves just as much at home there as the Eskimos. Plants do grow in the Arctic, animals thrive, Eskimos live happily. But it is still surprising that a 4YA item at 10.50 a.m. on Saturday, July 13, should be titled: "Flowers in the Arctic." Listeners will want to know what all this is about. They may be sure that what they hear has the stamp of authority, for the speaker is none less than Sir Hubert Wilkins. A Chemical Composer "Researches Upon the Fluoride of. Benzole," and "The Solidification of the Aldehydes" do not seem to have much to do with music, but it is a fact that Alexander Porphyrievitch Borodin was one of the greatest scientific figures of his generation (late nineteenth century). His chemical researches did not give him much time for music, but proof that he possessed "the vital spark" is evident in such compositions as "Prince Igor," the opera to be broadcast next week by 3YA at 9.15 on Sunday, July 7. It tells about the romantic adventures of Igor, who goes to attack the Khan of the Polovetzky and is captured. The opera’s score includes pleasing love songs and melodies, is especially notable for the exciting music of the dance of the Polovetzky. For many music lovers, this is a favourite piece. Namesakes _ There were three musicians by the name of Albeniz. Two were called Pedro, both good churchmen, who wrote. church music. One was called Isaac. Pedro (1) was a monk. Pedro (2) was more concerned with things secular, and founded the modern art of piano playing in Spain. Isaac, although no relation, capped off the tradition of the name. Pedro (1) was born in 1755. Pedro (2) heard his

first music soon after 1795. He was only five years dead when Isaac was born in 1860. Isaac was no monk. He ran away from home, ran away to sea, and played his way almost round the world before he got back, aged 13, to study on the strength of a royal grant in Europe. This very colourful character gave moderrt developed treatment to Spain’s traditional music, and is worth hearing. He is one of three featured by 1YX in the evening of Sunday next, July 7. Mary Mary’s career has reached the third instalment at Station 2YA. Mary is now making a home, and with Mary, of course, is the person who will sit on the other side of the fireplace and expect to find his slippers warming when he gets home from work. But Mary is making him earn his comfort. There are carpets to be laid, curtains to be hung (as our artist

suggests), floors to stain, a garden to dig, and a hundred other things to do to the house before it can be called home. This diary of the small but big things that happen during the life of a woman who was born, educated and married, will be continued from 2YA at 10.45 a.m. on Saturday, July 13. A Snob on Snobs It is one of the charges against Thackeray that he was a snob. He may have been, but it is also to his credit that he wrote the best of all books in condemnation of snobs. "The Book of Snobs" is funny, very funny in places: but it is also savage. Thackeray felt about some aspects of snobbery as many men feel toward positive evil; it infuriated him. O. L. Simmance is to read from "The Book of Snobs" from 3YA on July 10 at 8 pm. Thackeray’s prose is particularly easy, and "The Book of Snobs" should read well.