THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 539, 21 October 1949, Page 26

THINGS TO COME

| Hard Old Days HE terrors and hardships of the five months’ voyage from Ireland to Australia of an emigrant ship in 1850 are graphically recalled in Far From the Land, written by Ruth Park, the New Zealand writer, and prodticed with an Irish ¢ast in the BBC’s North of Ireland studios. Ruth Park got her facts for this play from an old Irish couple in Sydney whose parents had made just such a voyage. Hundreds of men, women and children wete crammed like cattle in the small, dark cabins and many of them never reached their promised land, for the nightmare of the voyage culminated in an outbreak of cholera. Many of Ruth-Park’s plays have been broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and in 1946 her novel, The Harp in the South, won a £2,000 prize and has since been published in Britain and America. Far From the Land will be heard from 4YA at 7.30 p.m. on Monday, October 24. b Talks on African Rugby NEw ZEALAND'’s seasonal change of scéne on the country’s sports grounds is now taking place, and the strictly utilitarian football, gear is giving way to cricket whites. But as far as broadcasting is concerned, Rugby will not go off the air entirely till Winston McCarthy, NZBS commentator with the All Blacks in South Africa, has given four talks from the Main National stations 6n Rugby in South Africa. The first will be heard on Tuesday, Ottober 25, the secorid on Thursday, October 27, the third on Tuesday, November 1, and the fourth on Thufsday, November 3-each at 9.15 p.m. The talks will probably be illustrated by excerpts from recordings taken during the recent All Blacks tour and with contributions by members of the All Blacks selection committee. Telepathic Pianists AWICZ and Landauer, the famous duo-piarists, think they have developed some kind of musical telepathy. They sit ba¢k to back at their grand pianos; unlike Moreton and Kaye, they never nod or make signs to each other, and cannot hear each other playing because there is "a wall of noise" between them. On some occasions they have performed in separate rooms, starting together and playing their complicated parts with perfect cohesion. At other times they have hurriedly decided to do an encore, both sitting down to play the same tune-but a different one from that they had originally decided on. Born in Poland and Austria respectively, they have adopted Britain as their countfy, and used frequently to play for the Duke of Windsor (then King Edward VIII.). They write their own afrangements, and have about 2,000 of them, which they keep in the bank for safety. Listeners to 1YZ can hear at 8.0 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26, one of a series of programmes entitled In Their Own Inimitable Way, devoted to recordings by these two pianists. The Bonny Banks OAMIN’ in-the gloamin’ has always been (according to Sir Harry Lauder) a favourite pastime of Scots lads and lassies on the "bonny banks

o’ Clyde." The BBC programme The River Clyde, which will be broadcast from 3YA- at 8.40 p.m. on Tuesday, October 25, takes listeners down the length of that historic river, from its source in a tiny pool to the Firth where the gteat ships come, Farming and heavy industry, orchards foaming with blossom, and great slag dumps, are all met with on the journey, which ends at -- or

the world-famous shipyards that have serit out sich ocean giants as the battleship Vanguard and the two Quéens of the Atlantic-Mary and Elizabeth. Of coufse the people who live and work along the Clyde have a common pride in their great river, and some of their voices will be heard in this programme. Living and Learning AST year Frank Sutton, a teacher at the Kaiapoi School, was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship which took him to the London Institute of Education. He wanted to see how the 1944 British Education Act was working out, but soon found that a yeaf was an inadequate period in which to sufvey everything. As a compromise he concentrated on the "tool subjects’those dealing with the communication of ideas inwards (through listening and reading) and outwards (through speech and composition), His investigations took him to tiny rural schools and great urban colleges, as far north as Skye and Inverness, south-west to Devon and Cornwall, and into ‘the heart of London’s tantalisingly amorphous education system. English education, he says, like the’ national and regional life it mirrors, reaches heights of attainment and depths of inertia beyond anything we in New Zealand can show. Yet there is an ineréasing, awareness of the need for equal educational opportunities. In four talks entitled Living and Learning in Britain, he describes what he saw in the English education system. The first talk will be heard from 3YA at 7.15 p.m. on Friday, October 28. The Inward Eye QNE of the purposes of the BBC's Third Programme is to encourage expériments in imaginative radio writing, and one of their most. successful experiments to date is Boy 1913, the first of a series called The Inward Eye, produced by Robert Gittings. The idea behind this series, according to the producer, was not so much to catalogue external facts atid outwatd events as to get behind the facts -- to record not so much what they were as what they meant, This called for a poet’s insight, and appfopriately enough Boy 1913 is written in blank verse. The author is R. C. Seriven, who interpréts with a mind grown up his experience of what it meant to be a boy in the days before

the first World. War, setting down the vivid personal impressions which flashed "upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude." Boy 1913 will be broadcast from 4YZ at 8.30 p.m. on Friday, October 28. The author as a man is played by Michael Hordern, and as a boy by Marcella Spencer. Ravel’s "Les Sortileges" AVEL’S amusing opera-ballet L’Enfant et les Sortiléges was composed in 1924-25, shortly before his more famous Bolero. The libretto bore the original title Ballet pour ma Fille, but as the composer had no daughter of his own he had it changed. The scene is an old Norman house, with a tea kettle singing on the hob, and a black cat purring before the fire. A small boy is sitting at a table-he is supposed to be studying his school books, but he wants to play. When his mother comes in he puts his tongue out at her and in punishment is made to eat tea without sugar and dry bread. In a rage he smashes the the tea pot, pulls the cat’s tail, upsets the kettle, and drags the pendulum from the clock, But when he goes to sit in the chair it gets up and walks away from him, and all the other objects in the room come to life and attack him for hi§ misbehaviour. In the garden a chorus of frogs, bats, moths, and squirrels cry for vengeance, He is miserable, and when he bandages the wound of an injured squirrel all the animals are spellbound at his change of heart. In the last scene, in what is probably the ballet’s most striking musical effect, they join him in his cry for his mother, who finally comes and takes him into her arms. L’Enfant et les Sortiléges will be broadcast from 2YA at 9.32 p.m. on Sunday, October 30.