LOOK BEFORE YOU LISTEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 89, 7 March 1941, Page 47

LOOK BEFORE YOU LISTEN

A Run Through The Records

By

B.

W.

The Other Thomas CORRESPONDENT wrote the other day to ask if there is any connection between John Charles Thomas and Thomas L. Thomas. There is none. Thomas L. Thomas was born in Wales, of musical parents, and at the age of twelve moved with his people to Scranton, U.S.A. But even at that early age he had travelled all over England and Wales with a juvenile Gilbert and Sullivan opera company, and although he had intended to be an engineer, continued studying voice and piano under his father. Then he entered for the Metropolitan Auditions of the Air-radio contests for young singers-easily walked off with first honours, and was given a contract with the Metropolitan Opera. Now he is so well known in America that when he returned recently to Scranton the whole town turned out to greet the " home-town-boy-who-made-good." The Harmonious Grandson LBERT COATES is the grandson of a Yorkshire blacksmith-and looks it. It is fortunate that he is amiable, for if he were not one can imagine him, enraged by a wrong note, snatching up a brass trombone and twisting it round the neck of its player, or hurling the kettledrums up at the Queen’s Hall organist. If ever there was a riot at an orchestral rehearsal Coates would just strip his jacket and fight the lot single-handed. In a few minutes every man, back at his desk, would be submissively scraping or tooting "dolce e adagio." So great is his control of the orchestra that he sometimes conducts without a baton, an idea he brought back from Moscow. The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Albert Coates will be heard from 3YA on Friday, March 14, Mark and Michal HE astronomer does not expect the star that shoots across the sky to do anything but vanish, nor does the critic expect premature brilliance to be anything but a momentary flash in the firmament of fame. Yet Mark Hambourg (whom not a few Listener readers remember as a rather overgrown schoolboy on the occasion of his first visit to New Zealand) proved that his precocity was as solid as that of Mozart or Paganini. His dayghter, Michal, carried on this talent for the piano when she made a gramophone record with her father at the age of eight. As a young child she toured with him, and she gave her first concert at the age of eleven with her cousin, Charles Hambourg, the conductor. When she was fifteen she went to the Royal College of Music, and gave her first recital at the Grotrian Hall about four years ago. With her father, Mark Hambourg, she will be heard at 2YA on Tuesday, March 11, in Liszt's "Concerto Pathetique." Strange Beginning USICAL careers sometimes have strange origties Take Hubert Eisdell’s as an example. A song which he once heard General Elwes sing, " Over the Way "-a song about an umbrella-got so firmly fixed in his mind as a musical experience that it took him to Elwes’s singing master, Victor Beigel, and then to fame. On Thursday, March 13, 4YA listeners will hear Hubert Eisdell, tenor.