Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 899, 26 October 1956, Page 19

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS ON AND OFF THE RECORD

LOCAL BOY

F you were to visit Alan G. Kennelly (above) at home on a fine weekend you'd probably find him working in the garden which he has laid out himself on a fairly steep Dunedin hillside. With October well advanced you might, on the other hand, not find him there

at all-for fishing is another of his interests. And since he confesses

that he is very fond of reading, spare time in the evenings or during wet weather is also fully occupied. Heard regularly in the 4ZB Women’s Hour, Mr. Kennelly is well qualified to look at home gardening problems as they affect women, for his wife shares his keen interest in horticulture. Mr. Kennelly is a Dunedin boy-he was born and went to school there, and had his early training as a horticulturist there and in the Oamaru Public Gardens. Then feeling that some overseas experience would be a good thing before he settled down, he spent about six years in England-two years of it in the famous Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. While in England he wrote on horticultural subjects, and several times he crossed to the Continent to visit

places of horticultural interest, particularly in France, Germany and Belgium. In the United States also he has looked at developments in his special field. Since 1941 Mr. Kennelly has worked in the Department of Agriculture and is now their Horticultural Instructor in his home town. Besides being the author of the Department’s publication, The Home Vegetable Garden, he has written regularly for the Journal of Agriculture and occasionally for other publications,

"ONE OF THE GREATS

nx \W HEN David Ojistrakh (right) visited the United States late last year he was acclaimed by both critics and public as one of the great violinists of all time. Winthrop Sargeant said of him: "He is the finest performer on the violin to come to light in the genera-

tion or so during which I have been listening to it’; and those who have heard recordings

he has made, playing the Stradivarius lent to him from the Soviet State collection, are bound to agree. Besides a vast number’ of classical works, -Oistrakh’s repertoire includes compositions of 'many modern composers, mostly Russian. Several, such as the Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, by Prokofieff, and the new Shostakovich Violin Concerto (A Minor, Op. 99), are dedicated to him. He played the Shostakovich Concerto in London early this year, and as an encore repeated the last move-ment-an almost unheard-of happening. In 1937, when Oistrakh was first prize winner in the International Ysaye Competition in Brussels, Carl Flesch, one of the judges, in reporting for The Strad, quoted from his own notes on Oistrakh: "Magnificent violinist, general technique of the highest standard. Tone virile and fine. Interpretation rather intellectual than spontaneous." Just after the war, when Menuhin gave some very successful concerts in Moscow, he and Oistrakh together played the Bach Concerto for Two Violins, which they repeated in the Prague Spring Musical Festival in 1947. ' On the concert platform the great artist presents a rather grim front, but in the less formal atmosphere of re-

hearsals he becomes completely human. Atticus, in The Sunday Times, illustrates well Oistrakh’s approach. " ‘Forgive me,’ he would say in Russian to Mr. Maiko, the conductor, ‘but this phrase does not sit well in the orchestra. It must sit firmly, solidly ... And he

would either sing the passage in his own melodious baritone, or draw from the violin an inspired synopsis of the composer’s intention. By a quarter to one the music was well set in its vertiginous course. ‘Da, da!’ said Mr. Oistrakh. ‘Now it sits! Da!’"