Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 801, 26 November 1954, Page 28

Open Microphone

FROM THE SUICIDE CLUB

IKE John Barrymore, Fredric March and Spencer Tracy, Bernard Kearns, of Christchurch, is what you might cdll a Jekyll and Hyde man. Although he has not played Robert Louis Stevenson’s celebrated dual role on the screen, he acted both parts in a radio adaptation of the novel which was broadcast from NZBS stations last year. "I tried to do both characters," he told

us when we asked him about his Stevenson readings. "Hyde was a pure James

Mason, as it turned out, while Dr. Jekyll sounded a little stilted, probably because of the prose of the period. But it was lovely stuff to read, very smooth, and it had been well edited beforehand by Arnold Wall." Bernard Kearns is again the reader in an adaptation of Stevenson’s The Suicide Club, which is being broadcast from 1YC at 10.0 p.m. on Tuesdays. This production also was done in association with Arnold Wall, Talks Officer at 3YA. The first result of their collaboration was a series of ten readings from The Dolly Dialogues, by Anthony Hope, which was broadcast in 1952 with Mavis Reesby in the part of Dolly Foster. "I did the narration and went into character for the other parts," Kearns said. "I remember there was one episode in which there were half a dozen other characters, but no Dolly, and it really taxed my vocal cords." The Suicide Club was not so hard from his point of view, he said, but for Arnold Wall. who had to edit the

book fairly stringently, it was quite a tricky job which turned out very well in retaining the essential atmosphere while giving listeners as much as possible of the story. Bernard Kearns has been a staff announcer at 3YA since 1950. Before that he toured with the New Zealand Players on their first tour, playing Ceci] in The Young Elizabeth, and Blore the butler in Dandy Dick. He was a student at Canterbury College when Ngaio Marsh selected him to go to Australia with the Canterbury Student Players. He took part there in Othello and Six Characters in Search of an Author, and stayed in Australia afterwards to try to make a living in radio. "I had no job, no digs and no money," he told us. "But I borrowed ten pounds from a friend and within a week I had signed a contract. It was extraordinarily good luck." After two years in Australia he came back, bringing with him a wife and baby daughter-for his Christchurch fiancée had followed him over the Tasman when he didn’t come back with the Student Players. Now, he said, he has three daughters, In his spare time from radio work Bernard Kearns devotes his energies to his old love, the theatre. "I’ve done three productions since I came back to New Zealand, including work for the New Zealand Drama Council and a production of Blithe Spirit at Westport. I was also tutor at a Summer School in Drama under Frederick Farley at Dunedin, and next year I’ll do the same thing again under Frank Newman."

LADIES OF SONG

S a pre-Christmas novelty in Radio Theatre Guest. Hour (1ZB, 9.0 p.m. on Sundays), Auckland singers are being heard in a popularity contest with the Auckland Radio Orchestra conducted by Oswald Cheesman. Each: Sunday a selected young lady sings an operatic aria, an excerpt from musical comedy and a popular song. and at the end of

the series all vocalists will sing again on the same programme. Listeners will be asked to decide the

most popular "lady of song," who will receive a prize, The first three contestants (whose photographs appear below) were Patricia Price, Beryl Dalley and Hazel Millar. Patricia Price has been learning singing for seven years from St. Mary’s School of Music in Auckland. She was second soprano soloist for the Auckland Choral Society’s productions

of Bach’s Magnificat and Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise. She was also runner-up in the Auckland Competitions Society’s John Court Aria Contest, and gained places in several other major sections of the Competitions recently held in Auckland. Broadcasting has also taken quite a large share of her entertainment activities. Beryl Dalley is an Australian lass. She has five years of study at the Melbourne University Conservatorium behind her and has broadcast for the ABC (and over Australian Commercial stations as well) as one of the Melbourne Singers, a popular vocal group. Beryl has also taken part in the Music for the People concerts which are practically an institution in Australian musical life. She spent three years in London, where she studied at the Royal College of Music and gave several broadcasts from the BBC. Hazel Millar is the wife of Felix Millar, leader of the Auckland Radio Orchestra. He and she have a "concert hall" house with a_ specially-designed lounge occupying 750 square feet of its 1250 square feet area. Their home is on Auckland’s North Shore overlooking Rangitoto Island. Felix teaches the violin there and the Millars’s friends enjoy delightful moonlight chamber-music evenings at the house. Audiences of up to 150 can.be accommodated, provided they don’t expect chairs and are content with rugs and cushions. Hazel Millar sings, of course, and plays the piano while her husband performs on the violin. Many visiting celebrities have called there to make music with the music-loving Millars.

RADIO PIONEER

nm NE of the earliest musicians to become associated with broadcasting in Auckland was Eric Waters, a teacher of music, composer and pianist. His death on November 8 at 64 brought to an end a notable career in the service of music and radio in New Zealand, He was born in Wellington and edu-

cated at Wellington College and Victoria University College. He taught music at Nelson College

and King’s College, and after war service became associated with broadcasting in Auckland. For a time he was official accompanist at 1YA, and later he took a permanent position with the NZBS as a programme organiser. He formed the first 1YA Studio Orchestra, and accompanied many — well-known

artists at the microphone. He also continued as a piano teacher, his pupils including Owen Jensen (who succeeded him as official accompanist at 1YA) and Mrs. Vincent Aspey, wife of the leader of the National Orchestra. Owen Jensen has described him as "a very clever natural musician, as well as a very good accompanist, and a conductor as well." He wrote the musical scores of the operettas Tutankhamen and The Abbess of Whitby, which were two of the most ambitious and. successful » productions staged by the Auckland Amateur Operatic Society. In addition to his musical activities Eric Waters took a keen interest in literature and other cultural airs, and was proud of the fact that @ was a cousin of Katherine Mansfield. He was a considerable linguist, and also a first-rate raconteur.

PICARDY AND ALL THAT

O you remember "Roses of Picardy?" You might if you heard it during the war as a revival, Actually, it was written a long time before that, because Dorothy Court, the wife of its composer Haydn Wood, first sang it frofn manuscript at a Belfast charity concert

in 1916. Later Wood was to conclude that "Picardy" was "a washout,’ but the washout has sold well over a million and a quarter copies and has earned its composer around £20,000. "Roses of Picardy" is probably the bestknown of the 200 or more songs Haydn

Wood has_ written, and the melody is used as signature tune for a BBC Masters of

Melody programme about him which is heing broadcast from National stations. Also on the programme is "A Brown Bird Singing," another best-seller sung by Doris Gambell; and Haydn Wood himself comes to the microphone to introduce "Joyousness," the item he chose to conduct. Haydn Wood was considered a boy prodigy on the violin. He was a pupil of Stanford, Charles Wood and Walter Parratt, and became a fluent composer in the classical and freer forms. He car-

ried off second prize-Frank Bridge was third-in the first Cobbett chamber music contest in 1905. In his twenties he was for eight years a concert violinist with the soprano Emma Albani (he visited New Zealand during that period) billing himself as Herr Zakavsky to avoid stigma when he came down to "playing the halls." According to Charles Reid, who wrote a pen portrait of Wood in the Radio Times a couple of years ago, that was his last concession to musical snobbery. In the summer of 1913 he and his wife bought for £200 a second-hand car with a driving seat wide enough to hold both them and their pianist. They set out on tour with the popular ballads Haydn Wood had begun to write. They were ballads addressed to people who "didn’t know the difference between a fugue and a fipple flute," and the trio kept going for 13 years at fees of up to £75 a week. Charles Reid describes Haydn Wood as small and straight-backed, with a cheerful eye and a mane of snowy hair -*a brisk worker still, capable of turning out the music for a five-minute ballad between breakfast and the nine o’clock news." on

SHARP TIMING

HE hero of Nicolai Gogol’s Russian comedy The Government Inspector, at present being broadcast in a BBC adaptation, is a humble little civil service clerk who is mistaken for the govment inspector by corrupt village offi-

cials-and takes full advantage of the error. He is plaved in the BBC version

by Max Adrian, who has a highly individual line in comedy and gives an amusing impersonation of a sly rogue.. As a comedian Max Adrian’s sense of timing is acute, and he is chiefly known to London theatre-goers for his work in such pointed revues as Tuppence Coloured and Penny Plain.

CORRECTION: In Open Microphone for November 12, Phyllis Mander was said to be married to an Air Force officer and living in Aden. Her husband is Graham Beavis, a petroleum technologist at Suez

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