Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 799, 12 November 1954, Page 20

Open Microphone

MAN OF PARTS

¢¢ 7]’D rather like to play a young man for a change, but nobody seems to think I can play a young man — perhaps it’s the beard," Roy Leywood said with a laugh while talking to us the other day about his life as an actor. For the last two years Roy has been one of the right-hand men of Bernard Beeby, head of the NZBS Productions Department. He has taken parts, large and small, in just about every NZBS

play produced in Wellington in that time, including that of the Duke in The _ Duke in Darkness. He has also produced several plays such as the recent thriller

The Pistol, and Fitty Pigs, an hour-long comedy which will be broadcast

soon. For a time also, while he was working for the ABC, he wrote several half-hour satires which went down well with Australian audiences. In England he played in a number of films and stage plays such as The Crime of Margaret Foley, and a revival of You Can’t Take It With You before returning to this part of the world with the company of Brigadoon. When the Brigadoon cast disbanded in New Zealand he decided to settle here. Roy Leywood likes to regard himself as an Australian, although he was actually born in Calcutta, where his mother and father (who were also actors) had stopped briefly in the course of a world tour. They came on to Australia, where’ Roy spent his earliest | years from the age of about six weeks. He went back to England to be educated, and got a job at 30/- a week as assistant stage manager with the Worthing Repertory Company, a professional group. "After a year my salary was raised to £2," he said, "and that was for working from 9.0 a.m. to 11.0 p.m. every day, collecting properties, helping paint scenery, and playing small parts. I went on tour with them, and later did some broadcasting for Radio Luxembourg. Luckily the Newcastle Repertory Company then took me on as stage director and second character man, playing Cockney and other dialect parts, elderly men, and soon. I must have

done about 400 shows in all before the war came along." He joined the Royal Sussex Regiment and served with the Eighth Army until E! Alamein, where his Brigade was badly hit. He then went to Paiforce, a unit in Persia and Irak, which was guarding the supply line to Russia. After nearly seven years of service he was discharged with the rank of Captain. It was just a few months after his marriage to a charming English girl ("although when she gets mad I tell her she’s Irish"). He now lives at Point Howard in Wellington, with his highspirited wife and a seven-year-old son. "We have a wonderful lot of bush around our house," he said. "I also make my own furniture, and to get timber I recently pulled down an old shed in the backyard. Its door was solid heart rimu and made a beautiful table-top-in fact, most people think it’s walnut."

SONGS BY HUGO WOLF

HYLLIS MANDER is one of the most talented singers Christchurch has produced, and made her name in the post-war years as an outstanding mezzosoprano. She began her career at an early age, studying piano under Alfred Bunz, but later concentrating on her voice. She won many prizes in music festivals and was chosen as finalist in the Melba Bequest. Later she visited England,

where her voice was highly. praised by Sir Steuart Wilson, former head of BBC Music.

She came home to sing in the Canterbury Centennial Music Festival, and was soloist in a number of oratorios, including The Dream of Gerontius with the Christchurch Harmonic Society, Messiah with the National Orchestra, and Haydn’s The Seasons at the Auckland Music Festival of 1951. She also sang as soloist in Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, and in Fauré’s Requiem with the Otago University Choral Society. On her last return to New Zealand she broadcast for the NZBS and also recorded two programmes of songs by Hugo Wolf and the contemporary English composer Herbert Howells, accompanied at the piano by Ormi Reid. These will be broadcast in coming weeks by YC and YZ stations, starting from 1YC at 8.0 p.m. on Saturday, November 20. Miss Mander has since left New Zealand again, and was recently married to an Air Force officer. She is at present living in Aden. She has been described as having a beautiful voice of exceptional range and purity of tone.

| NEWS OF BROADCASTERS, | ON AND OFF THE RECORD

SWEDISH TENOR .

USSI BJORLING, the operatic ina | concert singer, is only one of four tenors in his family. When he was ten his father organised the family into the Bjorling Male Quartet, and for two years they toured the United States, appearing in native costume primarily in Swedish churches and at Swedish com-

munity gatherings. Back | in Stockholm Jussi trained | as an operatic singer, and |

he was chosen by 1oscanini for the role of Don Ottavio at the Salzburg Festival of 1937. Next year he |

made his New York debut at the Met., singing in La Boheme and I] Trovatore. He stayed there until 1941, when he returned to Sweden, spending the next four years in the military forces and singing with the Stockholm Opera. In 1945 he reappeared in the United States and rapidly regained his old place as one of the leading operatic tenors in America today.

Jussi Bjorling, whose first name is the equivalent of the English "Jack," is described by David Ewen as even-tem-pered and affable, except before a performance, when "debut nerves" make ‘ their appearance. He is stockily built with the fair hair and light complexion often seen in Scandinavians. He loves the sea and spends much of his leisure time in boats and in fishing and swimming. Other diversions are tennis, billiards, and the Swedish sport known as hand-wrestling. In 1935 he married Anna Lisa Berg, one of Sweden’s most

beautiful women, and a lyric soprano of marked gifts, and they have three children. It is said that the essentially Italianate quality of Bjorling’s singing is the result of study with Tullio Voghera, the coach whom Enrico Caruso employed during his first six years in the United States. Mrs. A. Boon, of Hamilton, who has asked us to publish Bjorling’s photograph, writes to say that "Caruso’s wife paid him a grand compliment some time back -by stating he was the nearest she had ever heard to Caruso, and presented him with a costume worn by Caruso in his last performance in Rigoletto." _

’ ALL-STAR SEPTET

" MERICAN jazz has produced many’ extraordinary musicians, but Mel Powell is one of the few to make the transition from swing to serious composition without losing his mastery of either idiom. In a new recording by the Mel Powell Septet currently being heard

from YA stations, Mel leads an all-star group of jazz musicians in some of the most exciting improvi-

sations put on record. Mel had never played with «.1y of the musicians in this septet up to rhe time the recording was made, and the result was a constant stream of fresh improvisation, stimulated by play-backs, that eventually achieved a perfection that astonished not only the engineers and producers but the players themselves. Mel Powell was 16 when he replaced Teddy Wilson in Benny Goodman’s Band in the early 1940s. His arrangements and compositions proved highly popular, but then like most 18-year-olds Mel was drafted in 1943 and soon found himself in uniform in Glenn Miller’s Air Force Band, After Mitler’s death Mel took over the | band, but when the war ended ‘he threw up jazz for classical music, studying with Paul Hindemith. He is married to Martha Scott, and teaches music theory at Queen’s College, U.S.A,