What Our Commentators Say

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 461, 23 April 1948, Page 8

What Our Commentators Say

In the Family 4YZ programme, Music Runs in the Family, by Frank Beadle, turned out to be, for me, a disappointing application of ‘an original inspiration. Mr. Beadle, evidently in despair at finding in classical music a famous son to equal his famous father, contented himself with exploring the field of popular performers. Finding plenty of Crosbys, Millses and Boswells in this richly-populated field, he gave us over half-an-hour of them, but the actual music performed was not so richly rare in beauty or form as to warrant any attention from a commentator. The idea behind the programme, on the other hand, could have provided a very entertaining session, for genuine musiclovers. Names began at once to spring into my mind-the remarkable Bachs, for instance;*a complete half-hour’s programme, for the sake of comparison, might well be devoted solely to J. S. and his sons. For further examples of the father-and-son in music, I could recall only the names of Scarlatti and Strauss, but when I extended the idea to fields other than that of composition, the families of Dolmetsch, and of those older instrument-makers, Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari suggested that Music Runs in the Family might have almost unlimited possibilities of extension. Oratorios on the Air TATION 4YO has been running a series of half-hour programmes consisting of excerpts from oratorios-a splendid idea, except that it hasn’t been carried far enough. After all, what can you do with even one oratorio in a bare half-hour? All that the listener gets out of the attempt to cover five or six of them is a succession of mosaic fragments which don’t even belong to the same article, and the mental attempt to reconstruct the whole is of course impossible. Why not extend the time-limit of this programme? We have beén allowed, many a time, to hear complete oratorios over the’ radio, and on Sunday nights operas (not complete certainly) are regularly presented for our benefit. Why not, then, a series of complete oratorios? The oratorio, of course, is different from the opera in that it is more static. The characters confine themselves to philosophising or describing action, and the movement contained in a stage performance of an opera is entirely lacking. This makes the complete oratorio a much, more appropriate work for radio presentation than the opera; a brief pre- liminary mention of theme, characters, and composer is all that would be necessary, and the dilemma (which certainly exists when opera is putyon the radio) of "how to explain what is going on," simply doesn’t exist. No Game of Chance Two Can Play, an NZBS production ’ which I heard from 2ZB on a recent Sunday, earned my gratitude by being completely comprehensible. Its four characters were Mr. Weston, Mr. Eastham, Mr. Southern, and Mr. Norwood, all members of a select poker school, and so assiduously were details of the game incorporated in the drama that the little offering might well have been re-christened "You Too Cogn Play Poker." This delightful clarity extended

itself to the plot. Mr. Eastham, the host, is murdered, and after the usual "anteing up" by police and suspects a thrilling climax is provided by a battle of bluff between Southern and Norwood, the villain finally suffering the disintegration of the poker-face behind which his dastardly nature has concealed itself

so.long. Usually at the end of a murder play I am left feeling pleased that they got their man but conscious that they did it all while I wasn’t looking. G. Murray Milne puts all his cards on the table, tells me to pick one, then proves by easy stages that I picked the wrong one. The stages may, perhaps, be considered somewhat too easy by more experienced leapers to convictions, but even they will not resent a little poker tuition on the side. Tension Across the Tasman SENSE of the reality and earnestness of life which would have gratified the poet Longfellow was the most marked characteristic of the rival New Zealand and Australian quizlings taking part in the Grand International as relayed to Wellington audiences on a recent Tuesday. In fact, the whole programme endeared itself to me because its heightened &motional atmosphere was exactly that which had appeared to me to permeate the studio on the occasion of my first and only quiz, in the days when quizes were new and treated with far more respect than is the case to-day. The Inter/national Quiz provided a complete. contrast to the Maurie Power Jackpots which I had happened to tune into the evening before, where the quizmaster’s laughter rang merry as a marriage bell, and no gong sounded the knell of the fallen. Yes, Tuesday night was a very serious affair, the questions so tough that they could not be answered even by the sitting-room audience, the competitors so conscious of honour at the stake that even the audience’s toughened withers were wrung. (Who could fail to vibrate sympathetically to the hoarseness in the voice asking "Would you mind repeating the question?" or fail to be dashed by the quizmaster’s "I’m afraid you’ve missed out on that one," eonsidered in relation to the despairing bravado of the "I haven’t the remotest idea" which preceded it?) But from the consideration of these two contrasting sessions one very gratifying fact emerges, the fact that la gloire is

a far more potent force among quizaddicts than mere money. The competitor who on Monday night flunked the £24 question. laughed merrily at her own discomfiture, but a single gong stroke followed by deep black despairing silence engulfed the failure at international level. With Full Accompaniment SOBEL BAILLIE’S appearance with ‘ the National Orchestra of the NZBS made the Dunedin concert especially memorable, Miss Baillie has herself suggested that we are too complacent about our Orchestra. We have come by it too easily, and perhaps we are in danger of not appreciating it as we should had its inception been beset with almost insuperable difficulties. Lack of appreciation was not a feature of the Dunedin concert, but I wonder how many in the audience realised, apart from the orchestra’s own performance, just how excellent a thing it is to have an artist of Miss Baillie’s calibre accompanied by the correct orchestral combination instead of having her music watered to the flat level of a piano arrangement? Her Mozart in particular was a sheer delight, limpid and clear and sparkling, and it made me wish that she would continue to sing Mozart arias all the evening. The encores, however, had their own charm, being a Hebridean folk-song and the Fairy Song from The Immortal Hour, both accompanied, to my intense pleasure, by the harp. You see the point about having a_ full symphony orchestra to call upon? No Heroine, No Villain FTER listening to Joseph of the Pure ‘Heart or He Need Not Have Done It I decided I Need Not Have Listened, since Joseph seems to me further proof of a theory I have long held, that the scriptwriter is the only person who still

gets fun out of the Old-Time Theayter. ‘And Joseph is a particularly bad example of the genre even considered purely as Art and Craft. It makes no attempt to comply with the aims set out in the ‘session's introduction: "to reveal the depths of depravity to which the human soul can descend and the heights of heroism and virtue to which it can and does aspire." Joseph is that oxymoronic composition, that contradiction in terms. a melodrama without a

villain, and for that matter without a heroine. We have nothing to hiss but Joseph’s own stupidity, nothing to applaud but the too-long-delayed last line "And to think that I need not have done it." This is indeed a far cry from the basic tenets of the melodrama from which our Old-Time Theayter claims its descent, first that human nature is entirely good or entirely bad, second that riches predispose to villainy and poverty to virtue. Poor Joseph, to add to our confusion, begins by being incorrigibly middle-class, and even his sojourn in the gutter cannot rub off that bourgeois bloom.