THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 395, 17 January 1947, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

_A Travelled Singer | SIX Shakespeare songs set by the modern Italian composer Mario | Castelnuovo-Tedesco (whose name |means "German Newcastle") are to he | sung from the studio of 4YA on Janu- | ary 20, at 8.28 p.m., by Linette Grayson, lan Englishwoman who has come to New | Zealand to live. She was the daughter. | of a country doctor in Hampshire, and | her family went to Switzerland when she | was five. She went to school there, at | Geneva and Zurich, and later in England began to learn singing at the Guild- | hall School of Music. Then she went to | Holland and studied under Mme, Noordewier Reddingius, and returned to do | concert singing in England. A longing \for a sunnier climate brought her to | Australia before the war, but during the -war she returned to England and offered her knowledge of languages for the war effort. She worked in the British ‘censorship in London in 1940, then for |} two and a-half yeats in Bermuda, and was transferred to Trinidad in 1943. Then she went to South Africa, arriving on VE-day, and six months later got a | passage back to Australia. This year she /came to New Zealand to have a look |Tound, discovered Nelson, and decided | that she wanted to live there perma- ‘ nently. A Trip in Time PEOPLE don’t change, in the opinion of Allona Priestley, who has written a series of talks to this effect. Through "Spud," a 14-year-old New Zealand boy, his crony "Peanut," and Spud’s uncle, listeners will be taken back to the exciting days of bull-vaulting in Crete three to four thousand years ago, to the Greek Olympic Games, to chariot-raciag in the Circus Maximus in Ancient Rome, and to gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum. Coming nearer to our own times, there will be the sports of jousting, cock-fighting and prize-fighting. After hearing these talks, listeners may perhaps agree with Mrs. Priestley that the people of to-day are not very different from those of yesterday. Allona Priestley, a mistress at the Hutt Valley High School before her marriage, is no newcomer to writing for radio. Last year she presented a series OccupationHousewife for the NZBS and she has also written for The Listener. People Don’t Change will be heard weekly from 2YA, starting on Monday, January 20, at 7.15 p.m. The talks will, be read by the writer’s husband, A. D. Priestley. Bobby Howes Feels Different OBBY HOWES, that superb clown of the London stage, starts off by saying "Well, this is wonderful! I’m so used to people saying a few well-chosen words, with me standing shivering in the wings .. ... but this is different. I | just chat away to you like this, give you a song title, stand back, and about 35 people start working away like mad. I think I’m going to like this. ..." He is introducing the BBC’s All Join In, which is a programme of the favourite tunes of to-day and yesterday, specially designed

for people who want to join in and "whing, sum, or histle’-as Bobby Howes himself would say. Each of these programmes has some leading star to introduce it, and the music is provided by the BBC’s Augmented Dance Orchestra, and Vincent Tildesley’s "Mastersingers," who can best be described as the prin‘ciple of the male voice church choir applied to light and cheerful music. Ail Join In is to be heard from 1YA at 8.0 p.m. on Tuesday, January 21. Doctor Thorne ERE is a picture of Doctor Thorne, the main character in Anthony Trollope’s famous book in the Barchester_series. This series is discussed in one of the BBC’s New Judgment pro-grammes-a radio series produced by Stephen Potter and surveying with fresh

eyes the great books and writers of the past. It will be heard from 2YA at 8.28 p.m. on Friday, January 24, No books in*the English language can equal the Barchester novels as a picture-of middleclass life in the prosperous late 19th Century period-middle-class, and, especially, ecclesiastical life. The Warden, Archdeacon Grantley, and, above all, Mrs. Proudie, the Bishop’s wife, are characters that will live for ever. Elizabeth Bowen is the writer of this New Judgment, which was first broadcast by the BBC some months ago. Her script has since been published in pamphlet form. Sheep May Safely Graze ‘THERE seems to be no end to the permutations and combinations that can be made upon the name of a very well-known piece of music by J. S. Bach, which most of us know as "Sheep May Safely Graze.’ We remember having seen "Sheep May Graze in Safety," *"Flocks May Return to Pasture" (a local effort at translation from the German) and now here comes "Flocks in Pastures Green Abiding" (2YA, Thursday, January 23, 7.30 p.m.). But this new recording differs from the other versions in that it presents the piece as Bach intended it-for soprano, two flutes and continuo (piano and ’cello).

No husband and wife at two pianosno organ solo-no orchestral arrangement for ballet, just the recitative and. aria from the "Birthday Centata" and finely sung by the sopran@ Isobel Baillie. Bach’s accompaniment, which he put down in the musical shorthand known as figured bass, has been filled out by W. G. Whittaker. New Song Translations ‘THE translations of the Schubert and Schumann songs Dorothy Helmrich is singing on her New Zealand tour are a complete new set written by Sir Robert Garran, the Federal President of the Australian organisation CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) founded by Dorothy Helmrich. Sir Robert Garran has just had a complete set of his translations of the Schubert and Schumann songs published by the Melbourne University Press. Miss Helmrich says that these translations are specially written for . singers and are very good indeed, ‘Radar OW Britain’s lead in the development of Radar helped her during the Battle of Britain has already been made the subject of a radio documentary by ° the BBC, broadcast here by the NZBS. But next week listeners may hear a personal account by a New Zealander of an aspect of that story that was only briefly portrayed in the BBC’s Radar. Helen Stirling, who was a WAAF in Britain in 1940, has recorded two talks, the first of which is to be heard from 2YA at 11.0 a.m. on Friday, January 24. She has called her talks "A Radar Operator’s Impressions of the Battle of Britain." She will talk about the life at a Radat station on the Kentish coast, and how it all appeared to her then.