RADIO VIEWSREEL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 294, 9 February 1945, Page 6

RADIO VIEWSREEL

What Our Commentators Say

Auxiliary? \V HEN the Americans restored 1ZM to us it was announced that this station would thenceforth function as an auxiliary to 1YA, and we imagined a round-table conference in which 1YA, 1YX and 1ZM would divide us up and apportion among themselves the task of pleasing us all. But the function of an auxiliary, as often now interpreted by 1ZM, seems to be to serve up the same kind of fare that 1YA or 1YX is dealing out. On Monday nights, for instance, we have a very light and mixed programme from 1YA, from 1YX at 8.0 "Light Orchestral Music, Musical Comedy, and Ballads," and from 1ZM "Concert," which was a collection of very sugary songs last Monday. Yet on Thursday evenings at 9.0 1ZM lists a special series of "Music from the Ballets" (including "Aurora’s Wedding,’ "The Prospect Before Us," and "La Boutique Fantasque"), many of which would appeal to the very people who at that moment are interested in what is happening in the usually excellent Classical Hour from kX oes Not for Social Creditors ss "THE SAFEST PLACE IN THE WORLD," a BBC programme, was an interesting instance of the radio treatment of history, good points and bad. The subject was the Bank of England’s adventures from 1692 to 1780, during which period it seems a director was killed taking pay to William II1.’s troops in Belgium, and the Bank averted

financial panic in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and withstood a siege in the Gordon Riots of 1780. The eighteenthcentury atmosphere lent itself admirably to the slightly hearty and faintly facetious approach to which the BBC is addicted, but which appeared harmless and entertaining in this connection; although the panic in the coffee house (1745 episode) was far too fruity. Historical accuracy, as "far as I could tell, was satisfactory (though I am sure that William III.’s Dutch accent didn’t sound like that); there was also the authentic manner of eighteenth-century _ financial

London, with its incomprehensible mixture of radicalism and oligarchy. And it was dramatic to imagine, up and down the land, the savage clicks of the Social Credit Party switching off. Modified Mozart WE had recently an evening of modified Mozart from 4YA. Out of four items, two only were Mozart in the original form, The "Don Juan" Fantasy, played by Simon Barer, is just another of those colossal Liszt arrangements of other people’s music which lovers of the grandiose may hail as a tour de force, but which I heard an elderly organist dismiss, after a similar offering by another concert artist, as "just more fireworks." Likewise, if Seven Variations on

a Mozart Air from the "Magic Flute" are, as the announcer put it, "arranged by Beethoven," can the work be classed as "by Mozart"? Not that I don’t enjoy this lovely work, but I admit that I like my Bach and Mozart, in the terms of the "swing" addict, straight. Arrangements and works based on Mozartian themes, included with a _ bracket of Mozart’s songs and one of his Serenades for Wind Instruments, do not make an ideal programme, since neither the purist nor the cosmopolitan is likely to enjoy all of it. Opus 131 N Alfred Ejinstein’s new book, Greatness in Music, I enjoyed discovering that Einstein had always regarded the Capet Quartet as the most satisfactory interpreters of Beethoven’s last string quartets, since for me they have been the only interpreters of the quartets in A minor gnd C sharp minor. I had rarely heard any other recordings, and had always found theirs profoundly satisfying. Nevertheless, I was more than ready to listen to the Budapest quartet's new recording from 2YA, and found it just about twice as vivid as the old Capet records. It gives you~ bright colours where you found dull, neutral shades, fruity tones where you found bare chords. * * * HIS is the quartet for which Dr, J. C. Beaglehole wrote (in "Words for Music’’): What is this timeless world half-lit from out a sky that broods in level silence where silent hills ring the untrodden plain? In this sombre music, vividness is not always right. But sort out the movements (they are linked by little bridgepassages) and you quickly find the familiar lyrical Beethoven, the impetuous, violent Beethoven, even the witty Beethoven. Only note how the stage properties of a musical joke are transformed in this weird other-world of late Beethoven, Like the fantastic beasts in Matthias Grunewald’s painting "The Temptation of St. Anthony" (whose atmosphere this quartet so often evokes), the pizzicato interruptions in the third of the variations would have been amusing in another context, but here they are grotesque, even frightening. Gems. from Othello AST week I wrote enthusiastically about Ngaio Marsh’s interview at 1ZB, and I wish I could feel the same about her appearance there the next Sunday (January 21) when we heard a few brief extracts from Othello spoken by the players themselves, linked together by Miss Marsh-a "trailer" with running commentary by the producer. I would welcome almost any attempt to attract people to a performance. of Othello so moving and so vital as the one I saw the next evening, but this particular form of advertising seems to me to increase the greatest handicap to our enjoyment of Shakespeare on the stage, namely, the fact that so many isolated scenes, speeches, and phrases are all too familiar to us out of their context. It requires a great effort on the part of players and audience to put such a (continued on next page)

~ (continued from previous paged speech as "To be or not to be" into its proper place in the development of the whole, and though these players in the main lifted us triumphantly over this difficulty, that does not mean that it is altogether removed. I came less encumbered in this respect to Othello than I did to Hamlet, but I found that the gems I had heard from 1ZB on Sunday showed up a little out of focus at the play on Monday. Concertos for Two ANY great composers have borrowed unashamedly from folk-song, and I cannot see why anyone should complain that folk-song now raids the pages of the great composers in search of robust, hard-wearing tunes. But I wonder how many people who listen to the type of session in which "Concerto for Two" may be heard were awaiting the chance

of hearing this tune in its original setting in 1YA’s U.S.A. programme and were disappointed when some accident of fate (probably the railway strike) gave us Brahms instead of the Tchaikovski Concerto that was listed; or how

many people who adniire the Grieg: Piano concerto would be listening to 1ZB's "Listeners’ Request Session" on -a recent Sunday when this concerto was dealt with by a crooner and his friends, with no apologies to Grieg. Perhaps. it is a pity that two groups of listeners live in watertight compartments, for it might do them all good to hear both settings of a fine melody and to define to themselves why they prefer the one they do prefer. And I am grateful to the accident that led me to overhear a "Light Music" session from 1YA recently, when a jazz band briskly treated the opening of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C Major ("Sonata Facile" the books sometimes call it), for I felt sharply challenged by the fact that they were evidently getting much more fun out of it than I had ever done. Singer or Commentator? (CHARLES LAWRENCE may not mean much to you ‘as a name, but if you switched to 4YA at random, as I did, and tuned in to the middle of a programme, you’d recognise his voice immediately. After that, you’d probably do just what I did, wait till the announcer indicated who was speaking; for Lawrence’s voice is that same robust, hearty unmistakable "Aussie" voice which rattles the commentaries at you from those Australian screen newsreels. You didn’t know he could sing, too? Neither did I, but there he was, breaking into that ditty from the "Belle of New York" -"Of-course you can never be like us, But be as like us as you're able to be!" He sang another, too, "If They Ever Put a Tax on Love," which, not being from the "Belle," wasn’t so hot. And he sang both songs in an un-accented voice which would have passed in any English-speak-ing country in the world, since it was of that easy-to-listen-to, cultured variety which speaks, and sings, just plain English. The point is now, which is his real voice, the singing Charles Lawrence or the typical "Aussie" of the screen?