Easter Parade

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 20

Easter Parade

ASTER is a curious festival on the air, during which we are supposed to be sportive and religious on alternate days. I suppose this is a reasonable compromise between the two obvious preoccupations during the season, Whether racing people are content with the arrangement I can’t say; but Christian listeners have little cause to complain. We began, this year, with Lent, and the Lenten talks entitled Availing | Grace. Owing to circumstances beyond

my, etc., I heard only two of these. They were good, clear, basic stuff, well put over, and I’m told the others were as good. Nearer Easter came the St. Matthew Passion, as usual, if Bach is ever as usual, especially with Dr Lofthouse to introduce him. On the Saturday, breaking the pattern, Henry Walter devoted the second of his welcome return season of All Day Singing to American folk hymns. He began with one which has survived almost intact from Elizabethan times, and descended to revival hymns of more recent years. Not wholly descended, either. Some of these were surprisingly moving. Unfamiliar Easter carols-why un-familiar?-made an interesting contrast with familiar hymns in the Easter Festival of Nine Lessons from Christchurch Cathedral. The whole ceremony was beautifully done, as was to be expected, though to my ear the use of professional readers was a mistake, giving it too much the air of a concert performance. At night there was John Masefield’s mystery play set to music by Martin Shaw, an attractive little work well produced by the NZBS, though I’d have found it easier to follow if the dramatis personae had been announced at the beginning. I found none of the new spoken programmes as memorable as Flora Robson’s reading from Charles Peguy last year. The Holy Land, from the BBC, --

was a reverent pilgrimage making effective use of local sound. Gordon Daviot’s The Little Dry Thorn, an Australian production from the ZBs, told the story of Abraham and Sarah as cosily as a soap opera, with Sarah a familiar English upper middle class matriarch, Finally, The Heart of the Matter, with Edith Sitwell’s eloquent voice and exciting visions. And Benjamin Britten’s music-but before that had properly started, this reviewer, after so much Easter listening, drifted shamefully to sleep. Still, it had been a passably good

Easter on the air.

R. D.

McE.