"THIS WAR WILL GIVE A FRESH IMPETUS TO ART"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 127, 28 November 1941, Page 11

"THIS WAR WILL GIVE A FRESH IMPETUS TO ART"

Harold Williams Looks Optimistically to the Future

ee HIS war will give a fresh impetus to art and when it finishes with Nazism defeated we shall enjoy more beautiful music than ever." Such is the optimism which Harold Williams, the Australian baritone, feels justified in voicing when he looks at the future. "The last war," he said, in an interview with The Listener in Auckland last week, "was disrupting and disquietening in its effects upon people and the music and art of the period between the two wars is naturally a reflex of the state of the world at the time. Peace did not bring quietness and modern music has naturally been restless in quality, almost a vain striving." War And Harold Williams War has profoundly affected Harold Williams himself. When the last war ended, his one ambition, he says, was to get back to Australia and become a professional Rugby League footballer. Many of his old Rugby colleagues had taken up the game seriously and he wanted to get back among them, "But while I was waiting to get a ship to take me home," he said, "I took singing lessons and after a month or two at it, my old teacher said he thought I should stay in England and continue-studying. That decided it, and the next day I got my discharge from the Army." He never looked back, Now another war has come to turn his way of life topsy-turvy. After years of strenuous work in Britain, always on

the eternal theme, travel-rehearse-sing, he returned to Australia, bringing with him his wife and twin daughters, Vernita and Veronica ("both of them have had years at the piano, but they’d rather work in canteens for the troops or cook or ride horseback"). He Sings Better Here And he doesn’t think it likely that he will return to live in England. Now that he doesn’t have to sing in half a dozen different centres in the one week and keep perpetually on the move he is singing better than ever, He thinks the warmth of the Australian climate has something to do with it, too. Australia produces a lot of good voices because, in his opinion, young Australians are less exposed to weather which induces colds and throat complaints than children in other countries. Auckland listeners have already heard Harold Williams from the 1YA studios and he will be making his first public appearance in New Zealand at the Auckland Town Hall patriotic concert this week (November 27), along with the NBS Strings arid the 1YA Studio Orchestra, under Andersen Tyrer. Next Sunday and the following Tuesday and Thursday, he will be singing from the 2YA studios. Celebrity Concert At this concert Harold Williams will sing one bracket of songs with orchestral accompaniment, and the other with Henri Penn at the piano.

The programme will open with the Overture from Mendelssohn’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Harold Williams will follow in solos, with orchestral accompaniment, and the first half of the programme will conclude with Schubert’s Symphony in B Minor. The orchestra will reopen with "Les Préludes" Symphonic Poem by Liszt, Harold Williams will follow with further solos, and the programme will conclude with the performance by the orchestra of Sir Edward German’s "Welsh Rhapsody."