Homegrown

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 390, 13 December 1946, Page 10

Homegrown

A RECENT studio programme from 3YA was announced only as "Music for Voice and Piano, by Douglas Lilburn, presented by Gwyneth Brown and Gerald Christeller." This did not give anything like the full picture of the union of New Zealand artistic talents involved or associated in this admirable broadcast. The quarter-hour programme began with two songs by Mr. Christeller; they were Mr. Lilburn’s settings of two poems by the Aucklander, R. A. K. Mason, namely, his irresistible translation of Horace’s "O fons Bandusiae" and the lament "Song Thinking of Her Dead." In these both Mr. Lilburn and Mr. Christeller showed that a poem can, contrary to normal usage, become a song without being distorted, sentimentalised, or rendered inaudible, and can evén gain in charm and significance. This "O fons Bandusiae" perfectly caught the humour and sensuous joy of Mason’s translation; and I doubt if any who heard the second will re-read the line "where her small powerful face lies strong and dead" with quite the same feelings. There followed two of Mr. Lilburn’s pieces for piano, of which the first was the Fourth Bagatelle; an interruption caused me to miss the second. Last, Mr. Christeller re- turned and sang the composer’s setting of the Willow Song from Shakespeare’s Othello. This was first publicly heard two years ago as part of the Canterbury College Drama Society’s production of the tragedy; and those who heard it in its dramatic place will, I think, have found their attention on this occasion diverted a little from its isolated merits, which are considerable, to recall the intensity of that stage scene in which Desdemona sings it in random snatches before retiring to that bed where Othello presently visits her for the last time. Music, voice, poetry and theatre,

and the practice of these arts by contemporary New Zealanders, linked together and given solidarity and intimacy by the work of Douglas Lilburn, who contrives in these 15 minutes to give us a cross-section of recent achievement: this was a programme of importance, worth hearing, remembering, and-may I add?-repeating.