THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 631, 3 August 1951, Page 26

THINGS TO COME

; HILE 16-year-old Karen Peterson, a Correspondence School pupil from the Catlins District, South Otago, was |in Britain a few months ago as |New Zealand delegate to the World Forum of Youth, she looked about with very wide-awake eyes and kept her ears open, too. Some of the things she saw | and heard she discusses in three talks | recorded for the NZBS, which will be ) heard on Fridays in Women’s Hour,from | Commercial stations. They have already begun from 2ZA, which broadcasts the second on the same day (August 3) that they start from 1XH. Starting dates from the four ZB stations are: 4ZB, August 24; 3ZB, September 7; 2ZB, September 21; 1ZB, October 5. The first talk describes how the young delegates got to know each other and had a great deal of fun together in spite of differences of background; some of the sights seen in Britain and highlights of the | Festival are the subject of the second | talk; and in the last, Karen Peterson talks about a visit to the Shetland Islands. This last talk and another on the Shetland Islands will also be broadcast in the Correspondence School session later this year, and, it is hoped, the first two talks in this session early next year. The Orchestra PUBLIC and schools’ concerts will be given by the National Orchestra under Michael Bowles at Timaru and Christchurch next week. Mozart’s Violin Concerto in A Major, played by Eric Lawson with the orchestra, will be a feature of the public concert at Timaru, which 3XC will broadcast at 8.0 p.m. on Monday, August 6. Also on the programme are a Brahms Symphony (No. 3 in F Major), a Wagner Overture, and Three Irish Dances by Michael Bowles. The schools’ concert which 3XC will broadcast at 2.15 p.m. the same day will include music by Rossini, Wagner, Jarnefelt, Johann Strauss and Percy Grainger. On Thursday, August 9, 3YC will broadcast at 8.0 p.m.’a public concert at which Richard Farrell will play the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, and the orchestra will also give the first performance in the South Island of Symphony No. 1 in A Minor, by Douglas Lilburn. Works of Wagner ‘and Kodaly complete the programme. At two concerts for schools at Christchurch on Friday, August 10, the orchestra will play the same works as at the Timaru concert. One of these will be broadcast from 3YC at 2.15 p.m. Richard Farrell will again appear at the public concert which 3YC will broadcast at 8.0 p.m. on Saturday, August 11. He will play Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The Sym- | phony will be the Brahms’s No. 3 in F. Other works are the Handel-Beecham Amaryllis Suite and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by Dukas, Masterly Inactivity HILE the All Blacks were showing Australia how Rugby should be played--or should not, as the case may be-we at home were (and still are) enjoying the season when carpet slippers and the radio are the most important

items of the evening. And if we have chopped up our ouija board for kindling and scraped the last ounce of powder from the coalbox, we can go to bed early, reflecting that there is yet grace before an efficient wife demands aid with The Rite of Spring-Cleaning. Then

there are the long week-ends when the garden is too wet to work and a day at the races or an afternoon watching club football is indicated. Of course, life in New .Zealand is not always so pleasantly indolent, as listeners to 2YZ at 7.30 p.m. on Wednesday, August 8, may hear when a panel of four Napier speakers will discuss the question, "Do New Zealanders Take Life Too Easily?" This will be the first of six weekly Fireside Discussions. Other subjects will range from the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights to the benefit or otherwise of a universal language.

Language Byways ROFESSOR ARNOLD WALL will take listeners a long way back, "to a sort of twilight period, long before the Roman Empire disintegrated or our ancestors left their home lands to invade and occupy Britain,’ in a talk which 2YA will broadcast at 7.15 p.m. on Tuesday, August 7. Somehow or other, at a very early date, the Northern barbarians, who had not yet emerged into the full light of history, acquired an alphabet, modified it a little and used it for several hundred years. The letters of this alphabet were called runes. At first a part of the outfit of the priests or medicine men, they were later used for real writing, though they never quite lost their magical character in the minds of the ignorant, This talk on runes and runic monuments is the first of six on Byways of Language which Professor Wall gave some years ago. Newly recorded, they are now going on the air again for the benefit of those who did not hear them before and those who would like to hear them again. The other talks are on "The Anglo-Saxon Riddles," "Pidgin English," "Very Old Irish English," "Shall and Will" and "Phonetic Spelling." This last talk includes an up-to-date postscript on Bernard Shaw’s legacy to the cause. These talks will be broadcast weekly at 7.15 p.m. on Tuesdays. On Thunder Rock RECTED in memory of the captain, crew and sixty passengers of the steam packet Land o’ Lakes, which went aground there and was lost with all on board nearly a century before, the lighthouse on Thunder Rock was a place of

solitude and desolation. But the duty of lighthouse keeper was one that suited Charleston, who told his only friend, "Society has no worse enemy than a cynic-so I took this job to put myself out of circulation." Out of his loneliness Charleston developed a strange communion with the personalities of six people who died on board the Land o’ Lakes-not ghosts, he explains, but realities, living within his mind. How this came about, and what happened, listeners to 1YC will learn at 7.36 p.m. on Wednesday, August 8, when an NZBS production of Thunder Rock will be broadcast. William Austin, who also plays Charleston, produced it for the NZBS in the Auckland Recording Studios. The narrator is David Delaney and the players are Lawrence Hepworth as Streeter, Don McGregor (Flanning), Eddie Hegan (Joshua), Joe Allen (Briggs), Dennis Eves (Kurtz), Valerie Spencer (Malani), Peggy Walker (Miss Kirby), and Joy Asquith (Anne Marie). With All Their Faults ISITORS to England have had a lot to say both in praise and condemnation of the Englishman-his character, outlook and behaviour; and’ some Englishmen have not been slow to castigate their own countrymen. "But Lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing

and jeering at everything that looks strange," said Pepys; and Hazlitt, "The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation." Then in modern times the Archbishop of Cynicism made much capital out of his "Mad dogs and Englishmen." Taking opinions of the English expressed by visitors, from the 15th Century to the present day when the Festival of Britain is attracting people of many other nationalities, the NZBS has compiled a halfhour programme, Judgment on the English. Listeners to 2YC at 8.0 p.m. 6n Friday, August 10, will hear a survey of the terms in which the Englishman on his own ground has alternatively been damned out of hand and lauded to the skies. Musical Jape SIR THOMAS BEECHAM, now 71 years old, and as noted for his wit and rudeness almost as much as for his musicianship, recently conducted for the BEC a British Concert Hall programme which contains a work after his own heart-Haydn’s Symphony No. 94-The Surprise. In this Symphony the composer played a musical joke on audiences. During the second, slow movement eight bars of the theme are played piano, and then repeated pianissimo. The gormal sequence would be for the thefme to fade out but, suddenly, Haydn repeated it with the full force of the orchestra, drums and all. Played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, The Surprise Symphony will be heard from 4YZ at 9.4 a.m. on Sunday, August 12, followed by Mendelssohn’s Overture, Fingal’s Cave, Mozart’s March in D, and Weber’s Concerto in F Major for Bassoon and Orchestra.