Music for Children

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 412, 16 May 1947, Page 8

Music for Children

HE only time when I have really cursed the power-cuts was when they broke into two delightful recitals for school-children given in the Dunedin Town Hall by the NZBS Symphony ‘Orchestra. Although many of these works were not, strictly speaking, up to the programme standards expected of a symphony orchestra, yet they were eminently suited to the young audiences, and indeed, some of the items included in these afterRoon concerts would form splendid lighter relief in the regular concerts of the orchestra. Peter (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) and the Wolf and The Sorcerer's Apprentice, to mention two, make their appeal not only to children, and Raymond Windsor in the Mendelssohn Concerto would have been worthy of an adult audience. All of which merely adds up to the fact that I couldn’t hear all the broadcasts over the air on accéunt of those restrictions, and that I wished I had been aged 12 or so, and a member of those enthusiastic audiences which greeted the orchestra with such interest and joy. These school concerts (it cannot be repeated too often) are a most valuable part of the work the orchestra is doing in educating the audiences, and possibly the performers, of the future. If through the more popular type of orchestral item young listeners can learn to accustom themselves to the tone-colours of the symphonic combination, the instruments should become old friends to them, and orchestral music on the radio should in future be something to hear with interest, instead of being (as it usually is at present) something to switch off in favour of the latest blood-and-thundér serial.