The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 809, 28 January 1955, Page 14

The Week's Music...

by

OWEN

JENSEN

"Music FOR SCREAMING" (CYA link) is a programme you shouldn't have missed. It was like having an electric vibrator run through the scalp at full belt. If you were able to stand it, the toning up must have been just as effective. Jerry Colonna, maltreating "four old favourites’-"On the Road to Mandalay" was one-which have so often been put through the mangle that another going-over wouldn’t do them any harm, has a voice calculated to shake every termite out of the rafters. In fact, about the nearest thing to it would be a waterfront siren with a fog in its throat, except that Mr. Colonna times his effects with what must be a quite high degree of both art and technique. In these frustrating times when, in the city at least, it is dangerous to raise one’s voice in uninhibited exuberance, Jerry Colonna’s screaming was a welcome vicarious pleasure. The presentation was excellently done, too. From the human voice as‘a cathartic, let’s turn again, refreshed, to human voices in concert, as a musical instrument. These voices were those of the girls of Victoria College for Maori Girls and the boys of St. Stephen’s Maori College, featured in Song and Story of the Maori, which has been going the rounds of the stations. I cannot really believe that the voices of Maori young people are in general superior to those

of pakehas of the same age. That is, I can’t see any physical reason for it. That this particular singing was so enlivening was due, I am sure, to the admirable combination of enthusiasm and _ hard work with the very significant basis of music that the singers knew, understood and loved. As music, too, it was as different as chalk from cheese to much that is palmed off as Maori music. In fact, it made most interesting and pleasurable listening. For a surprise packet of interesting listening, too, let me recommend ZB Showcase (remember Amahl and _ the Night Visitors?) which can almost invariably be counted on to turn on something off the beaten track. This week it was a very much beaten track with the weeds cleaned up to let something a little more fragrant come through. A Man and His Music was a BBC production of the music of Sir Edward German. In avoiding the common fayt of romanticising or over-dramatising the composer, the producers did not, perhaps, sketch in the man as clearly as might be, but the variety of music presented said what was needed to be said. It was well to be reminded that German’s talent, for talent it was with no more than just a touch of genius, ranged wider than Merrie England, although as sung by the BBC ,\Welsh Choir with orchestra, even this chestnut came over fresh rather than roasted.