THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 380, 4 October 1946, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

Sea Drift J-REDERICK DELIUS’S composition Sea Drift has now come to us on gramophone records, and will be heard ‘from 1YX at 8.30 p.m. on Monday, | October 7, and 2YA at 7.30 p.m. on Thursday, October 10. It is written for baritone solo, chorus, and orchestra, and uses for its text the greater part, of "Out |of the cradle endlessly rocking" the first of the eleven poems comprising Whitman’s Sea Drift. The poem tells a tragic story of two sea-birds who built their nest on a lonely part of the shore, and of the boy who watched them at mating time "every day, cautiously peering, absorbing, translating." One day the she-bird disappeared and was never seen again. "And thenceforth all summer in the sound of the sea, and at night under the full of the moon... .I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the solitary guest from Alabama." The telling of the story is shared by the lonely boy (baritone) and the chorus, which also personifies the he-bird crying out to the wind and the stars to bring back his mate. Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) said of this work "the passion of the words and music rises with a perfection of poise and cadence that seems to echo the very sound of the sea itself, uniting the story and its setting in a single vision that grips the imagination with an almost uncanny tenacity." Bleak House VEST COAST listeners are now to have the BBC production of Charles Dickens’s ‘Bleak House from their own station. The first episode (of a total of 13) will be heard from 3ZR at 8.0 p.m, on Monday, October 7. The book was adapted for radio by Mabel Constanduros and Howard Agg, and the producer was Howard Rose. This version, a different production from the George Edwards one broadcast earlier, was heard from 3YA on Sunday afternoons last winter, and is at present being heard also from 4YZ on Sunday evenings. Easter Carols "BBC programme of Easter Carols, recorded by the BBC Chorus in the Churcp of St. Michael’s, London, with Dr. Harold Darke at the organ, will be broadcast by 2YC at 8.21 p.m. on Sunday, October 13. The programme was broadcast from several s‘ations last Easter, and it includes the following: "Love is come again" and "Cheer Up Friends and Neighbours" (old French tunes), "Easter Eggs" (a traditional Russian tune, which is heard in Stravinsky’s ballet Petrouchka), and "Now the Holly Bears a Berry." All these are included in the Oxford Book of Carols. The programme ends with an Easter hymn by Granville Bantock. Posthumously Composed HE symphonic scherzo which 4YA will broadcast at 9.54 p.m. on Thursday, October 10, is one of two movements written by the English pianist and composer, Frank Merrick, as a completion of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Mr. Merrick’s daring was inspired by the prize offered in 1928 by a manufacturer of gramophone records for a

scherzo and finale completing the Unfinished. The temptation must have been great for any manufacturer of records to instigate such a composition, which might have led to selling twice as many records to each purchaser of the Schubert. Be that as it may, various entries were received, and the first prize in the international section went to Kurt Atterberg, of Sweden (whose sixth symphony will be heard from 1¥YX on Saturday, October 12). Frank Merrick won the English section. Both movements were recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and it is the first of these that 4YA will broadcast. The Just So Stories \JELSON children who haven't yet heard the BBC production of some of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories are now to have the opportunity, because their iocal station 2YN is to broadcast them at 7.0 p.m: on Monday evenings, stariing with "The Elephant’s Child" (here shown in the author’s own

drawing for "How the Elephant Got his Trunk"). The series includes also "The Beginning of the Armadilloes," "The Crab That Played With the Sea," "The Butterfly. That Stamped," "How the Camel got his Hump" and "The SingSong of old man Kangaroo." Pied Piper and Others BEGINNING on Sunday, October 13 (4.30 p.m.) Mrs. Zoe Bartley Baxter, of Auckland, will give a series of six weekly talks, with musical interludes, on poetry and prose chosen from the last three centuries. The first three talks will have recorded music for illustrations; but the last three will be accompanied by the 1YA orchestra conducted by Harold Baxter, who has arranged music specially for these broadcasts. Mrs. Baxter’s first presentation is entitled "Contrasts in Humour" and consists of extracts of poetry and prose from anonymous authors. Hef other programmes will include readings of Christina Rosetti’s "Goblin Market," extracts from Longfellow’s "Hiawatha," and Browning’s "Pied Piper." Gulliver's U.235 [_ANDS OF FANTASY in next week’s readings from 1YA by the Rev. G. A. Naylor (8.35 p.m. Friday, eer 11), will be the lands Lemuel Gulliver saw. Some of the curiosities to be observed there are not without their relevance in this, the atomic age."One curiosity was the strange antipathy of the King of Brobdingnag to Gulliver's offer of the secret of an amazing powder that

would "not only destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each... . rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces . . . . dashing out the brains of all who came near. . . destroy the whole metropolis." The King was struck with horror that anyone could have such inhuman ideas, and said that some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. ... "As for himself, he protested that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom than be privy to such a secret, which he commanded me, as I valued my life, never to mention any more." Interplanetary THE SPECIMEN, a new play by J. Jefferson Farjeon, produced by the NZBS, will be broadcast by 2YA at 8.0 p.m. on Wednesday, October 9. William Todman, a "jovial, cheap, unimaginative personality" was the Specimen who was fished from the earth by an angler on another world, using Rod Lightno Electric 587, and (as bait) Local Suction, Augmenting. His capture proved, to the small-eared seven-fing-ered war-less inhabitants of the other globe, that Thobald’s theory was right, and there was life on Earth. And an injection of Linguistic Adjustment stuff made understanding possible between him and his captors, But they didn’t keep him long. He was back in his hotel bedroom, with its wide-open window (for he liked fresh air at night) before morning, and his acquaintance John Smith (who tells the tale in the play) wondered what might have happened if he’d been a different kind.