XYLOPHONIST FROM INDONESIA
NEW performer in the NBS Variety Show, when it made its public appearance in the Wellington Town Hall on Saturday, April 6, was a visitor to this country-Wladimir Laskin-Tanin, who shortens his name out of consideration for foreigners to Wladimir Tanin. He is a percussion player from Russia, who has been in the Netherlands East Indies for the last 18 years, and is a naturalised Netherlands subject. He came here recently with his wife and daughter among the refugees from Indonesia. He plays the xylophone and vibraphone, and at the Variety Show in the Town Hall (which was relayed from 2YA) he played solos on those instruments. Mr. Tanin was playing tympani and the xylophone in Russia before he. leftin the middle twenties-and on one occasion played Liszt’s second Hungarian Rhapsody with an orchestra of 200. Then he went to the Netherlands East Indies, where there is quite a sizable Russian community-big enough to have its own church. We wanted to know what sort of music was in the orchestral repertoire in the middie twenties-were the Muscovites listening to Shostakovich then?
"No, there was not much Shostakovich then; mostly the classics, Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovski. At that time Rachmaninoff was very modern," he told us orchestra, and used to broadcast a good deal. He showed us one photograph of the orchestra, with all its instruments, and his own elaborate percussion battery. "The Japanese took all my instru-ments-gone-I don’t know where. Destroyed perhaps." And there were two other photographs, which we print on this page. He laments his long term without practice in internment (which hé shared with Simon Goldberg, the famous violinist) and told us that he was once "virtuoso." In the main studio at 2YA he played for us In Java, he was in charge of a light Czardas Munti, Chopin’s Minute Waltz,
and Brahm’s Hungarian Dance No. 5S. When we said "Thank you" and "Very good" in our simplified English (Mr. Tanin is not yet fluent in English), he said "Not good. Not yet. In about two months, perhaps." Mr. Tanin has one daughter, who is a violinist and who has just turned 21, She received very high praise from Simon Goldberg in the Netherlands East
Indies, and her father has hopes for her. He himself is a great admirer of Goldberg and says he has never heard such a violinist.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 16
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395XYLOPHONIST FROM INDONESIA New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 16
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