ON TOUR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 21

ON TOUR

HREE New Zealanders well known in ‘Wellington musical circles will be touring national stations of both the North and South Islands at the beginning of February, thus enabling listeners in other parts of the country to get to know their work. Frederick Page, now Senior Lecturer in Music at Victoria University College, is a pianist who is keenly interested in contemporary music. He starts his tour, on January 29 at 1YA, from which station he will also be heard on February 1 and 3. He will play at 4YA Dunedin on February 5, 7, and 9. Christchurch will hear him from 3YA on February 12, 13, and 15. One of the pieces he intends to play is Douglas Lilburn’s Piano Sonata, which 2YC listeners heard late last year at a concert arranged by the International Society for Contemporary Music. Mr. Page will play the Sonata from 1YA on February 1, and from 4YA on February 9. The second of the three touring artists is Thea Smith, the well known Wellington contralto, whose picture was in the People in the Programmes page of last week’s Listener. She starts her tour at 3YZ Greymouth on February 5, and will give two more broadcasts from the same station on February 7 and 9. On the other side of the South Island, at Timaru, she will broadcast from 3XC

on February 12, 14, and 17, and then from 4YZ Invercargill, on February 19, 21, and 23. Dorothy Downing, the Wellington pianist, on a more northern circuit, starts her tour in.Napier, where she will broadcast from 2YZ on February 5 and 8. She travels next to Rotorua, where she will broadcast from 1YZ on February -12, then from 1XH Hamilton on February 13, 1XN Whangarei on February 16 and 17, and from 1YA Auckland on February 20, 22, and 24. Miss Downing was awarded an Associated Boards Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, London, in 1940, but was unable to take it up then of the war. She hopes soon to set out for London for her delayed period of study there. She was in Sydney for three months towards the end of 1948, and had lessons from Alexander Sverjenski. She broadcast for the ABC in December, 1948, from station 2BL Sydney.