THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 405, 28 March 1947, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

Easter Broadcasts ELIGIOUS services and Easter plays will be broadcast from the national and provincial stations at the end of the next week, which is when the festival of Easter falls this year. In Auckland, listeners will hear Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion in a performance by the Wellington Schola Cantorum. This performance was recorded in Wellington last year and broadcast by 2YA. Station 1YA will broadcast it in two parts-on Wednesday and Friday evenings. There will also be two church services from 1YA on Good Friday-a Combined Service at 10.0 a.m: and the Three-hour Service from St. Mary’s,- beginning at noon. In Wellington, "Stations of the Cross" will be relayed from St. Gerard’s at 3.0 p.m., and since a new recording of Handel’s Messiah has recently become available, part of this oratorio (belonging actually to the festival of Christmas) will be heard from 2YA on the evening of Good Friday. C. Stuart Perry’s Passion Play with music, Forgotten Sacrifice, will be broadcast by 2YA at 9.42 p.m. the same evening. It is a dramatization of the events leading up to the Crucifixion, and follows as closely as possible the four Gospels. Its author is the City Librarian in Wellington. In Christchurch the Anglican Service will be broadcast from the Cathedral in the morning of Good Friday, and the Saint Matthew Passion will also be relayed from there in the evening. Eastertide music will be played on the organ by Dr. J. C. Bradshaw on the following Sunday afternoon. In Dunedin, on Good Friday, there will be Edmund Barclay’s play The Light is Come at 2.30 p.m., a Combined Service at 7.0 p.m., and other special broadcasts for the day. "The Man of Sorrows" (from Dorothy Sayers’s play-sequence The Man Born to be King) will be heard from two smaller stations, 2YC and 2YH, on Good Friday in each case, and Stainer’s Crucifixion is to be done by the Combined Invercargill Choirs under Charles Martin; and relayed by 4YZ. Lili Kraus in Dunedin ANOTHER pianoforte recital by Lili Kraus will be given in the Dunedin Town Hall on Wednesday, April 2, and broadcast by Station 4YA. The programme will consist of four Beethoven Sonatas,’ but they will be a different group from the four which Mme. Kraus has already played in the other centres. She will begin with the "Pathétique" (in C Minor, Op. 13), and will then play the third of the Op. 31 group-in E Flat. After the interval Mme. Kraus will play: the Sonata in A Flat, Op. 26, (with the "Funeral March on the Death of 3 Hero"), and then her programme will end with the "Waldstein" Sonata in 13 Ss 33. First and Not Least ELLINGTON leaves even Wellingtonians cold some of the time, and, for that marginal quadrant of the Wellington province-the southern King Country-Wanganui is the centre of the world. In fact, in Marton, Hunterville, Mangaonoho, Ohingaiti, Mangaweka, Utiku, Taihape, and points North and South, there are people with splendid loyalty (and fine contempt for Weiling-ton-bred statisticians) who assert that Wanganui is not only the best but the

biggest little city in New Zealand. What other place could inspire affection like that in foreigners?, Has Auckland got a river? And didn’t one of Wellington’s own dormitory suburbs develop ungratefully into a city in its®own right with a Mayor and Town Council and all? Whether the NZBS did it on purpose, or

merely worked on an eeney-meeney-miney-mo basis, the Mobile Recording Unit visited the first place first and will present it on Wednesday, April 2, from 2YA at 8.0 p.m. in the first of two broadcasts called "Wanganui Scrapbook." Land of Our Fathers HE series of talks by Douglas Cresswell, More Historic New Zealand Estates, which started at 2YA on Thursday, March 13, will be welcomed by ‘those Wellington listeners who heard the earlier series which was" broadéast some years ago. Mr. Cresswell again puts the clock back to visit some of New Zealand’s famous pioneering families and trace the growth of their great land-holdings. In these talks appear such picturesque figures as ‘"Readymoney Robinson" of Cheviot, McKenzie the sheep-stealer, and Samuel Butler of "Erewhon." South Island names are writ large, but the North is not forgotten, the final two talks dealing with Rangitikei and Hawke’s Bay estates. There are 12 talks in the series, and they will be heard from 2YA_ every second Thursday, at 7.15 p.m. The second, dealing with the MacLeans of Waikakahi, is on the air this Thursday (March 27). The Redeemer ARTIN .SHAW’S Lenten oratorio The Redeemer, which was given its first performance in New Zealand last year by the Wesley Church Choir (Wellington), under the baton of H. Temple White, will be broadcast from 2YA on the evening of Tuesday, April 1, starting ut 8.8 p.m. It was broadcast in part last year, but this year’s performance will be heard in its entirety, relayed from the Wesley Church. The text was compiled by Joan Cobbold from the Bible, and from the verse of George Herbert, Francis Quarles, Christina Rossetti, and other writers, and is in three parts. The first deals with the Incarnation and the conflict of good and evil, the second with the Agony and Betrayal, and the last with the Crucifixion. The

Quarterly Record of the Royal School of English Church Music said of the music, "It achieves emotion ‘without sentimentality, excitement without vulgarity, and a dramatic sense which never descends to melodrama, and shows, in fact, all the best qualities of its composer's later idiom." And the Musical Times reviewer said: "The music itself is strongly inspired and of a rare quality. Shaw has done nothing finer than this, for the work is a masterpiece of its kind." Mr. Temple White will again conduct (with Clement Howe at the organ). The names of the seven soloists will be found under the programme entry on page 28. Katherine Mansfield Story "HE DAUGHTERS OF THE LATE COLONEL, one of the best short stories written by Katherine Mansfield, has been adapted for broadcasting by the BBC and sent to us in recorded form. Nelson listeners will hear it from 2YN at 8.22 p.m. on Good Friday (April 4). Katherine Mansfield left New Zealand when she was 19 and died in France at the age of 34, without seeing her country again. She wrote The Daughters of the Late Colonel early in 1921 when she was living on the Riviera,’ and it was included in her book The Garden Party. It is a brief glimpse into the lives and characters of two unmarried women who are bewildered by the sudden change in their affairs following the death of their father, "The Late Colonel." When it was first published it was attacked as being "cruel," and Katherine Mansfield was deeply disturbed to know that her pity towards "the poor old things" had been misunderstood. Although the story is full of high comedy, the clue to its meaning is in its ending-‘"a week since father died’"-when, as Katherine Mansfield later explained in a letter to a friend, "my two flowerless ones turned, with that timid gesture, to the sun."