Walter Midgley
HAD’ overheard Mr, Midgley singing Bantock magnificently in the studio, and when 2YA’s programme was suddenly changed to give an hour of a concert of his in the Wellington Town Hall, I listened with keen anticipation,
but was bitterly disappointed. Mr. Midgley has a wonderful voice, controlled with exquisite precision, but he lavished it on a programme which it is impossible to forgive. It began with the hoariest of operatic war-horses — O Paradiso, Thy Tiny Hand is Frozen, Flower Song from Carmen, and so On, some sung in
Italian and some in English. Mr. Midgley frequently treats the rhythm with contempt; in the aria from "La Boheme" his accompanist had a difficult time to follow him in singing which completely lost the flow of the music. I sat back, however, with the thought that here was just a bowing to convention, now we would hear -some of the masterpieces of music for voice and piano sung with the glorious quality of a first-class tenor. What did we get? Another group of mutilated fragments from operas, com.pletely unintelligible apart from their content, sung with piano accompaniment again. There I switched off. But if the newspaper reports of what Mr. Midgley later sang may be trusted, I missed little, since he descended to the most banal of ballads.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19490513.2.22.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 516, 13 May 1949, Page 10
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218Walter Midgley New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 516, 13 May 1949, Page 10
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