THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 632, 10 August 1951, Page 26

THINGS TO COME

HE main work in a BBC programme, Choral and Orchestral. Concert, to be broadcast by 3YA at 3.0 p.m. this Sunday, August 12, is Gustav Holst’s. First Choral Symphony, a setting for soprano solo, chorus and- orchestra of poems by Keats. The first movement has a prelude, "Invocation to Pan," followed by a "Song and Bacchanal," the words being taken from Endymion. Ode on a Grecian Urn provides the subject of the slow movement, and here the famous words, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," are sung by the chorus to sustained chords and answered by the soprano soloist, "That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Fancy and Folly’s Song make up the text of the Scherzo and in the finale the god Opollo, the Muses and the poets are invoked in music which, as a critic has written, is "of a spaciousness and grandeur that forms a noble climax to the whole work." Recital by Donald Munro WELVE years ago the Dunedin baritone Donald Munro went to London, where he won a scholarship in open competition at the Royal College of Music. Two years later he was awarded the Tagore Medal, presented each year to the most outstanding student. He took part in many broadcasts of important musical works and appeared frequently on the concert stage. In one of his BBC Third Programme recitals he sang two groups of songs by Geoffrey Bush and the late E. J. Moeran, accompanied by Frederick Stone. This recital, on BBC transcriptions, will be broadcast by 4YC at 8.24 p.m. on Monday, August 13. Fruity "HE Battle of the Bottoms," which has been fought in the past between North and South Island fruitgrowers on the question of thin or thick bottoms for fruit cases, may again crop up at the Dominion conference of the New Zealand Fruitgrowers’ Federation in Wellington on Tuesday, August 14. But the conference is likely to pay more attention to the control of marketing and distribution by the Apple and Pear Merketing Board. Delegates will no doubt hope for references to these matters in the address by the Minister of Agriculture (Hon. K. J. Holyoake) at the opening of the conference. An edited version of the opening ceremony will be broadcast by YA and YZ stations at 7.0 p.m. the same day. Progress with Tradition HE night of May 10, 1941, in London was fine and clear. At the Palace of Westminster, Victor Goodman, reading Clerk of the House of Lords, was on civil defence duty. Shortly before midnight bombs and a shower of incendiaries started fires near the House of Commons and in Westminster Hall, All the efforts of the fire fighters were concentrated on saving the historic Hall. — "T opened a door," said Goodman, "and was thrown back by a wall of flame. The House of Commons had disappeared." His description of that night forms a prologue to the story of how a>

new House has risen on the ashes of the old. The new House of Commons, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, is a triumph of progress reconciled with tradition. A BBC documentary programme, The New House of Commons, will be

broadcast by 3YC at 9.30 p.m. this Sunday, August 12. The narrator’ is the Maharaj Kumari Indira of Kapurthala, Parliamentary reporter in the BBC’s Overseas Services.

Big Day HE day when planes with red, white and blue markings flew over an internment camp in Java, throwing out pamphlets to say that the Japanese Army had surrendered, was a big one for Ada Bristow, who was teaching at a school in Sourabaya when the war started. In a talk in 2YA Women’s Hour on Tuesday, August 14, she will describe the coming of the Japanese, her journey to the camp and the sort of life she lived there, underfed but doing hard and tiring work as a nurse in the camp hospital. Before the Japanese handed over the camp after the war, they saw service in defence of the internees against the Indonesians. Mrs, Bristow liked New Zealand so much when she was recuperating that she later "settled here and married a New Zealander. Also to be heard in this Women’s Hour programme to mark the anniversary of VJ Day (which falls on August 15) is Amy Marion Millar who, after the Japanese surrendered, was sent to the East as a charge sister to help with the repatriation of New Zealand prisoners of warone of whom she eventually married. She has an interesting story to tell of the experiences that awaited her at the end of her flight to Singapore in a heavily-laden Dakota Transport. Liszt's Child HE symphonic poem was a creation of the 19th Century, and there ‘is reason to’ believe that it has not yet

reached the zenith of its development. This, at any rate, is the view taken in a series of four programmes, The Symphonic Poem, the first of which 2YC will broadeast at 8.57 p.m. on Wednesday, August 15. Liszt was the father of the symphonic poem which was probably his greatest single achievement in orchestral music. He wanted a form, more unified than the symphony, which would translate into tones a poetic or dramatic text and in which ideas could germinate freely at the will of the composer. The idea of the symphonic poem spread and paved the way for realism and impressionism. Debussy, Dukas, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Respighi, Sibelius and Delius are mong the composers discussed in these talks, which are illustrated with examples of the form., From the Depths UTH PARK’S Poor Man’s Orange, a novel of life in Surry Hills (a Sydney slum), made her the most outstanding social novelist writing in Australia today, said Colin Roderick in his recent book, An Introduction to Australian Fiction. This is the young New Zealander’s second book with a slum setting, and in a talk which she has recorded for the NZBS she explains why she writes about slums, Ruth Park lived for more than a year in Surry Hills, which, with a neighbouring district has, she says, the highest infantile death rate in the world’s white cities, where at least 40,000 homes have been condemned as unfit for human habitation, and where a child’s chances of becoming a criminal are three times greater than in the outer Sydney suburbs. While hating the place Ruth Park admired the people who lived there for their neighbourliness, charity, loyalty and kindness; she has. become for them a voice "to tell the complacent and the comfortable what misery and injustice exist in their own progressive cities." Her talk, Why I Write About Slums, will be broadcast by 1YZ at 7.15 p.m. on Thursday, August 16. Music from Mexico ON Sunday, August 19, at 3.0 p.m, listeners to 2YA will hear a recorded programme of ‘Mexican music, presented by an orchestra of American and Mexican players and the Chorus of the National Music League, conducted by Carlos Chavez. The opening work will be Sones Mariachi, by a young Indian composer, Blas Galindo. The title means pieces played by a mariachi, or ensemble consisting classically of two violins, a large and a small guitar, and a harp, to which are now added a clarinet and a trumpet. This will be followed by Dance to Centeotl, a ritual adoration’ of the Goddess of Maize, and sung in Aztec. Next will come Huapango, an arrangement of native Vera Cruz dances by Geronimo Foster, a student of folk lore. The final work is La Paloma Azul ("The Blue Dove"), whose origins: are in dispute. The programme will occupy an hour.