THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 470, 25 June 1948, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

Days of Triumph IN the BBC programme The Elizabethans we get a glimpse (through the eyes of script-writer Douglas Cleverdon) of the golden age of England when Elizabeth was Queen. Cleverdon’s picture of those days of triumph and high enterprise, when the might of Spain was laid low by a second-class Power, is created through the voices of many of the bizarre types ef men who boisterously lived and died at that period. Townsfolk and country squires. soldiers and cutpurses, players and puritans, all take their part in a programme which reaches its climax with the words of the great Queen herself. The Elizabethans will be heard from 1YA at 2.0 p.m. this Sunday, June 27. ® Speaking foreOurselves JEXT Monday four enlightened intellectuals will gather around 2Y4A’s microphone to try and answer questions submitted to them, by radio’s latest questionmaster, Professor G. W. von Zedlitz. The session in which they will take part is called Speaking for Ourselves, a local alias for Brains Trust. The members of the panel are R. M. Burdon, Dr. T. O. Garland, George Joseph, and A. B. Thompson, and the questions to be submitted to them by Professor von Zedlitz are part of the large number’ sent in by listeners to form the material for the Brains Trust sessions conducted by the BBC’s questionmaster Donald McCullough when he was out here a few months ago. Speaking for Ourselves will be heard at 8.20 p.m. on Monday, June 28. | Next Week’s Oratorios NEAT week oratorio will find the air again as both Auckland and Wellington choral societies put on' their winter performances. On Wednesday evening, June 30, the Royal Wellington Choral Union’s performance of Mendelssohn’s St.Paul will be broadcast from 2YA between eight and nine o’clock. The conductor will be Stanley Oliver and the soloists Merle Gamble (soprano), Sybil McKinney (contralto), Hubert Milver-ton-Carta (tenor), and Stewart Harvey (baritone). From 1YA listeners will be able to hear a complete broadcast of Haydn’s Creation by the Auckland Choral Society at 8.0 p.m. on Saturday, July 3. The conductor will be George Tintner, and the soloists Lesley Daykin (soprano), Raymond Opie (tenor), and Ashley Pollock (bass), It is interesting to note that while Mendelssohn wrote St. Paul when he was only 26, Creation was composed by Haydn (about 40 years earlier) in his 66th year, and although St. Paul is deservedly popular, it lacks the maturity and depth of power of the earlier work. Operatic Landmark GLUCK’S Orpheus and_ Eurydice (1762) was a landmark in the history of opera; and is to-day ‘the earliest operatic work by any composer that still maintains a place on the regular stage.

"Modern audiences think of it as a work which takes them away from the luscious eroticism of Wagner and _ Richard Strauss into a region of unearthly dignity and classicality, a world inhabited not by men and women, but by marble statues miraculously -endowed with life and motion," says Edward Dent, "but to Gluck’s first audience it must have been a curious experiment that defied all the

current traditions.’ The opera was in fact a mixture of French and Italian conventions, having only three characters, no tenor or bass parts (except in the chorus) and in spite of its basically French construction, only three acts and a libretto in the Italian style. A new recorded version of the opera with the Glyndebourne Festival Chorus will be heard from 4YZ at 2.15 p.m. on Wednesday, June 30. In the Gulf Country N Australia’s Gulf country the stockmen ride endlessly across the plains. They are tall and bronzed ‘men, tough and sinewy, with the magnificent physique that comes from life in the open air and in the saddle. Around campfires at night the aborigines dance through primitive rites, and by day crocodiles snap in the sluggish rivers, and strange tropical birds sun themselves on the banks. With the coming of the full moon, river boats take out their cargoes of wool and meat to load the steamer from Brisbane, while in the Gulf itself the small bulk of Thursday Island rises from the sea amongst white beaches and green palms. There the pearling luggers lie, manned by Malayan crews and Japanese divers. The romantic story of life in the Gulf of Carpentaria is told by Dr. Agnes Bennett, O.B.E., in two talks on The Gulf Country, the first of which will be heard from 3YA at 7.15 p.m. on Friday, July 2. Music for the Films ILM music is one of the youngest and most vigorous forms of an old art, and with’ the production of such scores as William Walton’s background music for Henry V its prestige has increased rapidly. . It really started to develop at the end of the silent days, when special scores began to be sent around with each film to save cinemas from having to rely merely on the ingenuity of the local pianist. With the arrival of talkies and pictures of the Broadway Melody type, music in films

received a decided fillip, but it was not until Arthur Bliss wrote his score for Things to Come (1935) that it became established as a new type of music. Since then much has been done by producers, directors, and musicians to explore the full Possibilities of music in relation to films, and: many distinguished composers have been called upon to write film scores of high musical merit. The story of the development of music in British films will be’told in a new series of programmes called Music in British Films, which starts from 4YA at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, July 3. ‘Whiteman and Gershwin PAUL WHITEMAN was first and Beethoven second in a plebiscite recently taken of the students of the University of Arkansas to determine the identity of the world’s’ greatest musician." So said an American musical journal published in 1926, and a possible explanation of this bemused state of mind is that in the ’20’s Whiteman had become the acknowledged leader of the new jazz movement. He brought about recognition of jazz as a serious art with his world-wide performance of works like Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which was hailed when it first appeared as a link between composers of the jazz camp and the intellectuals, Another of Gershwin’s serious works was the Piano Concerto in F, and when he died in 1937 his music was still kept sbefore the public eye by Whiteman’s endeavours, often assisted by Oscar Levant, the pianist friend of the composer. Listeners. to 2YC on Sunday, July 4, will hear the Concerto in F played by Oscar Levant as the last item in a programme of American music which starts at 8.0 p.m.