THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 388, 29 November 1946, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

India, Then Geneva ‘THE REV. H. W. NEWELL, recently appointed assistant general secretary to the World Council of Churches, will take a look at India in two talks which Station 2YA will broadcast on Tuesday, December 3, and Tuesday, December 10, at 7.15 p.m. Mr. Newell, a graduate of Cambridge University, is well acquainted with his subject, for he wes principal of the Benares Boys’ High School and then of Coimbatore Boys’ High School, in South Indid@@uring a period of 11 years as an educational missionary. In 1944 he became the first general secretary of the National Council of Churches in New Zealand, and he takes up his new appointment in Geneva early next year. Mr. Newell has called his first talk "What British Rule Has Done for India," and he follows it a week later with "Britain and IndiaFriends in Freedom." Ectoplasmic FEW weeks ago the NZBS Production Studios gave listeners a strange tale of Old China, No Re-Becoming, which concerned a man who found himself involuntarily adventuring into metaphysics. The other day the producer (Bernard Beeby) received from the United States a radio script of the late Thorne Smith’s farce, The Adventures of Topper, so the studios decided to try another ghostly excursion, but this time from a purely comedy angle. The script is the same as that used by Roland Young who played "Topper" for American radio as well as in the film, and it will be the first "Topper" radio presentation in New Zealand. The part of the fugitive from ectoplasm in this, the least Rabelaisian of Thorne Smith’s novels is played by Harry Painter; Topper’s wife is taken by Pauline Heanv, George Kerby by Selwyn Toogood, and Marion Kerby by Sinclair Ronald. Thorne Smith addicts will be familiar with the two low-plane spirits whose good deeds as passports to Heaven result merely in getting Topper into one piece of trouble after another. There are 15 episodes in this serial which starts at 2YA on Wednesday, December 4, at 8.9 p.m., and which will be heard weekly thereafter. 6 Messiah, or The Messiah? HIS js the time of year when all the choral societies up and down the country sing Handel’s oratorio, Messiah (for instance, on 4YA at 8.0 p.m. on Wednesday, December 4). But although Handel wrote this most famous and loved of oratorios 205 years ago, and it has been a steady favourite ever since, there still seems to be no general ‘agreement about whether it is The Messiah or just plain Messiah. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Percy Scholes’ Oxford Companion to Music agree thet there should be no The. Our inclination is to take the view that Grove and Scholes are the arbiters to go by. But other authorities of quite good repute use The most emphatically, and in the

last edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, Sir Donald Tovey, used The throughout. The point is, of course, that Handel actually called the work Messiah. And it is on this question whether or not the name the composer himself used is preferable to a universal usage derived from the Bible, that the division occurs and still persists. The appeal to the Bible can be answered by saying that we are dealing with the name of an oratorio by Handel, not with the correct name for The Anointed One. But then, having agreed to that, someone might object (as the Musical Times did in 1941, when it upheld its preference for The) that Handel was a German, and followed a German habit. And this use of The is no modern innovation. The Dublin paper that reported the very first performance called it The Messiah. But it’s a question of choosing one thing or the other, and we stand by Grove, Scholes, and Handel (German or no German). But not with any intention of curtailing anyone else’s liberty to speak as he wishes. Turandot ‘THE opera to be heard on Sunday, December 8, will be Puccini’s Turaiidot, and it will come over 2YA, starting at 8.05 p.m. and stopping for the usual interval at 8.45 p.m. Puccini didn’t actually finish Turandot; the final duet

was still to be completed when he died in Brussels in 1927. Franco Alfano wrote it out to an ending. Turandot is the story of a Chinese princess who will marry the solver of three riddles. After three suitors: have been put to death for failing, Calaf comes and guesses all three answers. But then he offers to follow the other three to the block if the cruel princess can guess his name. She tries hard, and tortures his father and a handmaider. in the attempt to discover it, but in the end Calaf’s wooing wins Princess Turandot, and he tells her that the word for "love" is his name. Puccini, by the way, may be figuring in a picture soon-in a film life of Mabe} Wayne, who wrote "Ramona" and "In A Little Spanish Town." Mabel Wayne showed "Ramona" to Puccini in a hotel, and he advised her to submit it to a publisher, and that was the start of her fame. Belshazzar’s Feast ILLIAM WALTON’S oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast is to be broadcast again next week-from Station 1YA at 9.30 p.m. on Friday, December 6. This

is the secorfing made under the auspices of the British Council during the war, which was first heard here in October, 1944. Frank Howes, music critic to The Times, described the oratorio for BBC listeners when it was broadcast in 1942 in these words: "Formally, this powerful work is certainly an oratorio, but the feeling is secular, not sacred. It embraces in its short course the setting of two Psalms, but the rest of the text is a transcript by Osbert Sitwell from the Bible. It is laid out for chorus, semichorus, very large orchestra, and baritone soloist. The choir is the protagonist, and there is nothing reflective in it, the final paen of thanksgiving drives home forcibly enough the moral. lesson of arrogance brought to nought. It might almost have been written as a prophetic reminder of what we are going to see again at this late stage in the world’s history." Flourish of Trumpets ON’T you like showing off? — Yes, and so does everyone else. But would you like to know how to do it ar istically, so that you get your own satisfaction and-more important-the financial rewards of self-advertising? Those questions being answered in the affirmative, you cer ainly ought to listen to the latest jeu d’esprit of the BBC’s Stephen Potter and Joyce Grenfell which 4YA will broadcast at 7.30 p.m. on Friday, December 6. "How to Blow Your Own Trumpet" is an entertaining, illuminating, and not altogether unsatirical survey of the whole business of boasting from the early days of the Homeric heroes through the panache of Elizabethan times, to the modern "muted trumpet" or inverted modesty that one gets so accustomed to among adults. But, of course, as the programme shows with s’ch unkindly pointedness, straightforward boasting still exists among the very young and the very old. 4