PARTNERS IN OPERA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 460, 16 April 1948, Page 19

PARTNERS IN OPERA

ISTENERS in New Zealand will shortly hear a serial in six episodes, Gilbert and Sullivan: The Story of a Great Pattnership, which was one of the BBC’s most successful productions last year. It brought a flood of appreciative letters from British listeners and enthusiastic notices by the radio critics. This production, in which the tale of the oddly assorted pair of geniuses is told against a setting of the best and gayest songs from the operas, is on the grand scale. Leslie Baily, whose Scrapbook programmes have long been a popular BBC feature, wrote the script after intensive research. The songs and music

are given by well-known singers, with the BBC Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, and a strong cast of actors and actresses play the dramatic scenes. Howard Agg is the producer. The serial will be in six episodes, It will trace the careers of Gilbert and Sullivan from their early experiments in writing and music through the greatest partnership in the history of the theatre, and it will tell the background story of the operas that are loved as well to-day as when they first delighted audiences more than half a century ago. The series will be introduced in a talk by Sir Malcolm Sargent, who is well qualified to talk about the Savoy operas, for he has been a Gilbert and Sullivan lover since he was a small boy. At the age of 16 he conducted The Gondoliers for his local amateur operatic sociéty. In 1926 Rupert D’Oyley Carte asked him to take charge of the music for an important revival of the operas in London, and he was in charge again at another revival in 1929, this time at their original home, the Savoy Theatre, which had been completely rebuilt.