THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 475, 30 July 1948, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

4YZ’s Tenth Birthday ECORDED messages from the Minister of Broadcasting (the Hon. F. Jones), and the Director of Broadcasting (Professor James Shelley) will open Station 4YZ’s 10th anniversary pro- ' gramme on the evening of Monday, i August 2. Then the Mayor (A. Wach- | ner) will speak and the programme to follow will contain highlights of 10 | years’ broadcasting from the southern station. Among the performers will be } the first artist to broadcast from 4YZ, and some of those who have made regular appearances during the last 10 years will be introduced to say a few words and present an item. On the sporting side each year will be dealt with separately. Among the incunabula unearthed will be the first episode of the now seemingly unconquerable serial Dad and Dave. There will be short greetings from former station managers and recordings by famous artists of the concert platform who have visited Invercargill in the last decade. The anniversary programme will start at 7.30 p.m. and carry on till close down time at 10.30 p.m. From Music’s Golden Age ONALD and Zillah Castle will present from 2YA next week the first of a series of six half-hour recitals of early music played on instruments of the period. The recitals will include several first performances of instrumental and vocal compositions played in their original form. In the first programme, to be broadcast at 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 3, listeners will hear the first New Zealand performance of a sonata by Ariosti for vidla d’amore and harpsichord played from the original manuscript, and Loeillet’s Sonata in C Minor for treble recorder and harpsichord, .Later programmes will include the three songs "A Pilgrim’s Progress," by John Dowland, as well as. music by Bach, Purcell, Handel, and Pepusch. Vocal items will be sung by Sybil Phillips (soprano), Roy Hill (tenor), and Joseph Miller (baritone). The programmes will be broadcast at fortnightly intervals under the title of The Golden Age of Music. Music Exams N some of the radio discussions heard recently all the speakers have found themselves in general agreement, though they may differ in minor detail, but this is not the case, so we are told, with the discussion to be heard in 1YA’s Let’s ‘Talk It Over session gn Sunday, August 8, at 4.0 pm. The subject is "Are Music Exams Necessary?" and 1YA ‘has taken advantage of the presence in Auckland of two visiting musicians to ask them to give their views and argue the question with two local residents. Dr. Edgar Bainton, a former director of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and examiner for the Royal Schools of Music, takes up a_ strong stand in favour of examinations, while Dr. Charles Nalden, lecturer in music at Auckland University College, is equally opposed to them. More compromising positions are taken up by Guy ‘Marriner, lecturer in music at the

University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Franklin Institute, and L. C. M. Saunders, music master at an Auckland private school and music critic for one of the newspapers. Composer "to the King PURCELL’S only opera, Dido and Aeneas, was composed, . strangely enougli, for a girls’ boarding school run by a dancing master named Joshua Priest. The libretto was furnished by Nahum Tate, and the whole dialogue is

in recitative. It is perhaps the first true opera by an Englishman, and one that is still heard to-day .with delight, so that it is surprising that Purcell wrote afterwards only what might be called "near-operas." A possible reason is that the almost incessant provision of incidental music for plays, and the numerous court odes, anthems, and other music for official occasions that he wrote in his capacity as "composer in ordinary to the king," did not leave him the time for another full-length opera. Dido and Aeneas is characterised from beginning to end by Purcell’s dramatic directness, and Dido’s farewell song in particular is a flawless piece of music, classical in its form yet of rare emotional quality. Graceful dance, choruses, lumbering sailor dances, and witches’ incantations relieve the tragedy, and after Dido’s farewell anti-climax is avoided by the final soft and tenderly expressive chorus, "With drooping wings, ye Cupids, come." The opera will be heard from 2YA at 9.32 p.m. on Sunday, August 8. For the Very Young VEST COAST boys and girls will shortly have the opportunity of meeting a little man who revels in the fact that fate has provided him with a permanent set of hiccups. He is Hiccup the’ Gnome, one of the main characters in 3ZR’s new serial for children, Jimmy Winkle in Story Book Land. ‘This feature, which has beén written and produced in, the 3ZR studios, introduces to listeners a number of well-known story book characters. There is Old King Cole, who owns a private ice-cream parlour, Sinbad the Sailor, rated as the wisest man in Story Book Land, and the most terrible of all witches, the Witch of Rumplestitch. The first episode of Jimmy Winkle in Story Book Land will be heard on Monday, August 2, at 4.30 p.m, Gracie Fields Programme WO songs that Gracie Fields learnt when she was out here in 1945 were Alfred Hill’s Waiata Poi and the Maori farewell song "Now is the Hour," which

she sang all the way through Australia and America on her way home, and then popularised in many of her concerts in England on her return. It was probably because of her efforts that the tune became all the rage overseas a while ago, and there is a story that thousands of her records of the songs, flown to America during Petrillo’s recent ban on record-making there, earned many valuable dollars for Britain. In a new series of 13 half-hour programmes called The Gracie Fields Programme Hawke’s Bay listeners will be able to hear this popular singer in some of her latest songs and comedy numbers. Music is supplied’ by Phil Green’s Orchestra, but Gracie does all the rest, sings, introduces herself and her items, and cracks jokes in between times. And each programme concludes with her own inimitable version of "Now is the Hour." The Gracie Fields Programme starts from 2YH at 830 p.m. on Wednesday, August 4. How They Live in U.S.A. HREE-and-a-half years in the United States, an American husband, and a baby born in Utah have given Beatrice Ashton, formerly Beatrice Hutchison, of Wellington, a fair idea of the American way of life, as many of our‘readers will remember from the series of articles which she wrote for The Listener last year. Now Mrs. Ashton is to give a group of talks from 2YA on HomeMaking in America, the first at 10.25 a.m, on Thursday, August 5. She will explain, first, the joys of working in a kitchen fitted with every conceivable labour-saving gadget (American husbands, too, are adepts at whipping up a favourite dish for the family), and concocting anything from a waffle to a "pie a la mode." Then will come a description of how American parents bring up the baby and the complementary work of the pediatrician who has nothing to do with feet but is- the American counterpart of the Plunket nurse. This will be fdilowed by a discussion of the question, "How Hard Do American Women Work?" The fourth and final talk will be on the uses to which American women put their leisure.