Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 668, 24 April 1952, Page 24

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS, ON AND OFF THE RECORD,

By

Swarf

HE clean shaven, wavyhaired young man _ whose photograph you see here used to wear a beard; but he was in the Navy then. He is Alex Lindsay, Wellington violinist, principal and, conductor of the Alex Lindsay Orchestra, and broadcaster. When he

lived in Inyercargill he learnt an instrument, but he had no idea of becoming a professional musician, However, he gained a scholarship, went to the Royal College of Music, and played for three years in the London Philharmonic Orchestra. While in England he married Wendy Haddon-Jones, now a viola player in his orchestra. "I’m one of those. queer professional musicians who really love music," he remarked the other morning. "And as well as classics I like ‘hot’ music-the- hotter the better; you know, the Stan Kenton and George Shearing recordings. As for the middlebrow stuff, well, I hate it!" Lindsay was sub-leader of the National Orchestra when it. was formed in 1946, In

1947 he got players together to make up his own String Orchestra, which gave its first public performance the same year. "We hope,’ he said, "to develop the ifformal type of concert on the lines of those we gave recently in the National Art Gallery, Wellington. Later this year we intend to present an all-Bach programme." Today Alex Lindsay plays a valuable Guadagnini violin which he has on loan from a Hawke’s Bay resident. It had been locked up in a bank, but the owner’s daughter suggested that it should be played again, and that Lindsay was the man to play it. This Friday evening (April 25) 2YC listeners will hear the final of his series of Corelli sonatas for violin and piano, with Loretto Cunninghame (pianist).

CLASSICAL AND LIGHT

ae eed 7 [v's ten years since I first met Robert Henry. He was entertaining troops in a recreation hut at the Dannevirke Army School of Instruction. We met again the other lunch hour. He was inspecting a Wellington shop window and ruefully extracting thorns from his fingers after a week-end’s gorse-grub-

bing in the back-yard-which is not good for pianists. Today Robert

Henry is 2ZB’s official accompanist’ and the man who presents the Magic Carpet of Music session from 2ZB on Monday evenings. Another Invercargillite, he passed his Trinity College fellowship examination in his early twenties, and made his first appearance in radio at 2YA-in 1937. He has always been closely associated with the piano, but never so intimately as when he was once’ playing for an army open-air Church service in Central Otago. A gale sprang up and overturned the piano, which fell on _ his chest, pinning him to the ground. He has accompanied well-known artists, including Elsa Stralia, Peter Dawson, Senia ("The Leetle Bell")

--' Chostiakoff, and more recently, the cornetist Ken Smith. His first preference is for light classical music, he told me, but he gets his greatest musical thrills from recordings by Backhaus and Horo-

witz. Besides his radio work Robert is musical director of the Wellington Orphans’ Club and conductor of the orchestra. By day he is a civil servant with a classical, but not so light occu-pation-Death Duties Examiner for the Inland Revenue Department.