Soloist from Melbourne

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 492, 26 November 1948, Page 10

Soloist from Melbourne

[TTA BERNARD, the Melbourne contralto, who has been engaged by the Auckland and Wellington Choral Societies to sing in this year’s performances of Messiah atid whose photograph appears on the cover of this issue, will give six studio recitals for the NZBS while she is in New Zealand. She will be heard from 1YA on Sunday, December 5, Wednesday, December 8, and Sunday, December 19; from 2YA on Sunday, December 12, Wednesday, December 15, and Thursday, December 16. Etta Bernard was last heard over the air here in 1940, when she gave a series of recitals from 2YA on her return from England. In England she had been giving broadcasts and public concerts for six years-since she went there on a scholarship to the Webber-Douglas school of opera and dramatic art in 1934, While in England she broadcast for the BBC and sang at the Regent’s Park Shakespearian season in 1935. In 1936 she sang with the British Opera Company under Albért Coates at Covent Garden, and appeared in Coates’s opera Pickwick, the first opera to be televised at Alexandra Palace. She took part in a contest held at the Vienna Academy of Music in 1937, and won fourth place, and in the same year she sang as the Australian representative in the Coronation Choir at Westminster Abbey. Her New Zealand recitals will consist of two programmes of opera and oratorio solos and one lieder programme from 1YA, and programmes of lieder, ballads, and English art songs from 2YA. The Auckland performance of Messiah will be broadcast by 1YA at 7.45 p.m. on Saturday, December 4. The principals besides Etta Bernard are Myra Sawyer (soprano), Raymond Opie’ (tenor) and Stewart Harvey (baritone). The condtctor will be Georg Tintner (see page 21).