Grand Opera Broadcasts for 1954

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 752, 11 December 1953, Page 18

Grand Opera Broadcasts for 1954

\VitH the coming of the New Year, the NZBS will be giving lovers of grand opera something of a new deal in listening. All operas broadcast from February onward will be on LP recordings, which give greater fidelity of sound, and schedules will be so arranged that "new works, or new recordings of familiar ones, can be broadcast soon after they -arrive in New Zealand. Though the total number of operas broadcast annually will be slightly reduced, listeners whose sets can receive two YC stations will be able to hear three full-length operas a month. Those whose sets confine them to one YC station will hear two a month. Under the new system, one grand opera will be presented simultaneously from all YC stations at 7.0 p.m. on the fourth Sunday of each month. This series will be planned to cover as wide a field as possible, and generally the works will be heard throughout the year in the order of their composition. The first to be heard, for instance, will be

Monteverdi’s 17th Century operatic masterpiece The Coronation of Poppea. This will be presented on February 28. Those for the two succeeding months. are Gluck’s Orpheus and Euridice and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. These network programmes will include in each case a brief evaluation of the opera by a speaker with particular knowledge of the period concerned. In addition to these linked operatic programmes, Stations 1YC and 3YC will schedule a second series of operas during the year, and Stations 2YC and 4YC another 12. Those to be broadcast in the three months from February, 1954, are Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Puccini’s La Tosca (from 1YC and 3YC), and Offenbach’s La Belle Héléne, Tchaikovski’s Pique Dame, and Verdi’s Ernani (from 2YC and 4YC). None of these will be broadcast in the same month by any two stations, and they will be scheduled to avoid too close proximity to the network broadcasts.