Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 718, 17 April 1953, Page 24

Open Microphone

_- — — NEWS OF BROADCASTERS, a

Rf ON AND OFF THE RECORD,

By

Swarf

IPPING into the storied yesterdays of the province, 2XP New Plymouth has come up with the first series of a new feature It Happened in Taranaki. On Monday, April 20, at 8.1

p-m. listeners will be taken back to legendary times with the first talk. "Winged Men by the Walking Mountain." The series continues with other intriguing titles, including "Follow: the Barb to Waitara" and "How the Mountain Gained in Stature." Legend and actual history have been woven into these sagas of early Taranaki, which in the first six talks cover Maori times up to the arrival of "The Gods of the Sea" -the pakehas. Station 2XP plans to continue the feature with detailed stories of the first hundred years of European settlement. Joan Faulkner Blake, who tells the tales, says the outline of some of the stories will be familiar to Taranaki folk, but she thinks the details of some of the history will be a surprise to all but the keenest students of fact and fable of the province. wy

MUSIC BEFORE MEAT

CORRESPONDENT wants to know something about Ambrose and his Orchestra, whose music has long been familiar to NZBS listeners. Bert Ambrose is a musician who goes back to the days when, as he puts it, people went to restaurants and hotels to dance,

and not just to swallow a_ good steak. Born in London, Ambrose visited ‘America

| during the First World War and at the age of 16 led his own band at a wellknown New York restaurant. When he returned to England he took over the band at the Embassy Club and stayed there for six years. After that, with his May Fair Hotel Orchestra, he broadcast for five years on Saturday nights, introducing melodies that have since become jazz classics-"Rody and Soul," for instance. Sam Costa, Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton were among his vocalists; Ted Heath, Stanley Black and Sid Phillips a trio of his instrumental players, who now lead their own orchestras. His signature tune is "When Day is Done." y +

& PATRON OF THE ARTS

OHN McHUGH, who sings with ~ Mantovani’s Orchestra in several BBC London Studio Melodies pro-

gtammes now going the rounds of the National stations, has had a singing career that recalls the old days of patrons of the arts. While he was working in a Wolverhampton factory he was

given a chance to broadcast as one of Carrol Levis’s discoveries — a programme for promis-

ing young amateurs. A music lover was so impressed by the quality of his tenor voice that she telephoned the BBC and asked to be put in touch with him. Later she made it possible for him to study under leading teachers in England and Italy. +

ROBERTA’S FUTURE

T was announced in The Listener recently that Joy Nichols intends to leave the BBC this year and go home with her husband, Wally Peterson, to Australia. I have since heard that when Gracie Fields saw Joy’s daughter (now

just over a year old) she told the almost equally famous mother: "Why, with a lovely

baby like that, don’t you leave the show business and have a dozen more?" The story goes that Take It From Here enthusiasts clicked their needles at such re a pace that they knitted enough baby

clothes to rig out a score of Robertas. The surplus found its way into deserving hands, About Roberta’s future Joy says that when she’s old enough to make up her own mind, she can decide for herself if she wants to enter the show business, In the meantime she is to have a normal, happy childhood, just like any other little girl. Early this year Joy Nichols was appearing in Wonderful Time, at the London Hippodrome; Jimmy Edwards in London Laughs, at ‘tthe Adelphi Theatre, London; and Wallas Eaton in Zip Goes a Million, at the Palace Theatre, London. ~

PURE POETRY

MY cherished hope is that one day _ the plant geneticists will cross a

grapevine with a breadfruit tree and _ produce ready-made _ cur-

Tant Duns. ine very idea of such a thing is poetry-pure poetry.-From an NZBS Book Shop programme. +

-ORTY years ago there first appeared on the stage the group of characters who represent Australia’s nearest approach to authentic folk drama-Dad and Dave and all the family and their friends of On Our Selection. Steele Rudd, invented them and Bert Bailey. who died in Sydney on March 31 at

DEATH OF BERT BAILEY

the age of 81 (and his company), gave them flesh and voice for their long career on stage and screen. Steele Rudd

(Arthur Hoey Davis) was born in Queensland in 1868, and his native scene is the

primary background of his characters as they were first conceived. Although they have since passed through most phases of Australian back-country life they are still engaged in an apparently eternal series of radio programmes. They first appeared in The Bulletin, Sydney, says Paul Maguire in his The Australian Theatre, at about the turn of the century. Bert Bailey joined up with Rudd to give them their stage-being at the King’s Theatre, Melbourne, in 1912. They walked almost every stage in Australia and crossed most of its screens. Bailey, who was born in Auckland, went to Australia in 1900. He presented Dad in association with Julius Grant, the Fullers, and E. J. and Dan Carroll, Bailey and Cinesound, made screen versions of On Our Selection in 1931, and Grandad Rudd in 1935. Dad and Dave Come to Town was made in 1938, and

Dad Rudd, M.P., in 1939. The radio serial we hear today from the NZBS is produced by the George Edwards Company. +>

REITH LECTURES

» aad OR the first time, in 1953, an American will give the BBC Reith Lectures. He is Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer, of the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton, New Jersey, who

has chosen as his subject "Science and Contemporary Man." The Reith Lectures, first given in 1948

by Bertrand Russell, have become an annual event in British Broadcasting. They consist of a set of broadcast talks on a thesis of contemporary importance and interest, and are named after the BBC’s first Director-General, Lord Reith, of Stonehaven, now Chairman of the Colonial Development Corporation. *-

JAZZ ON THE GO.

[ ISTENERS who missed a broadcast by 2YA the other evening of excerpts from one of Auckland’s Jazz Concerts, will have another opportunity of hearing how the Aucklanders do it if they listen to 1YA at 10.0 p.m. on Thursday. April 30. for half an hour.

The performers are Julian Lee and his Orchestra: the John Mackenzie Trio; the Sextet from Lower-Upper

Queen Street; and Jimmy Warren and his valve trombone. Two innovations are 4 A

Stan Holland and his original Dixie Jazz Band, which played at the Point Chevalier Cabaret 25 years ago, and Julian Lee using the Town Hall Grand Organ to accompany Colin Martin, tenor saxophone player.

FAMOUS GUEST ORCHESTRA

JK ARL MUNCHINGER, who conducts the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, one of the distinguished visiting orchestras at the 1952 Edinburgh Fesc

tival (programmes are now being heard from NZBS National stations) studied

music sin Germany under Hermann Abendroth. After graduating in 1937 he conducted the Hanover Symphony

Orchestra for two years. It was with this orchestra that he gained his reputation as one of the best of the younger generation of conductors, especially in the works of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. In (1946, from among

‘the leading German and Austrian instrumentalists he founded in his home town the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. He rehearsed his small group for six months and it was only after this period that he began his series of triumphant tours in the great musical centres. He gave 124 concerts in the first year and his ensemble was said to be the finest chamber orchestra in Germany. In 1949 the orchestra gave nine concerts in Switzerland, which were enthusiastically received, and two more in Paris, where the public acclaimed it as _ having ‘reached almost the peak of musical perfection. In Spain in 1950 the orchestra was received with vast enthusiasm. After a tour through the larger French cities Karl Munchinger presented his ensemble for the second time to Paris, this being its 650th concert. The orchestra’s first broadcast for the BBC was in November, 1950, when it was heard in the Third Programme. The 1952 Edinburgh Festival programmes, transcribed by the British Broadcasting Corporation, will | be heard later from the YZ and X Class stations,