A Hitch in Time
RECALL Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera! as one of the most enchanting evenings I have ever spent in the theatre, and I was delighted to hear it again from YC last week. The opera, The Little Sweep, which forms the second half of the evening’s entertainment, was given alone, and it runs about an hour. The music is always charming, often brilliantly adroit, and I could discern from time to time Britten’s considerable debt to Verdi, which he does not hesitate to acknowledge. I was a little repelled by the upper-class pipe of Master Hemmings, who revealed, in his spoken dialogue, no trace of his humble origin. But what really incensed me about the broadcast was the arbitrary deletion of ten minutes of the score, which included the hilarious fugue "Help, help, she’s collapsed!" though, through some technical hitch about twenty bars of the deleted passage were given, only to be extinguished by the audience song which opens the third scene, The opera thus finished ten minutes early, and this space was filled in by piano duets for reasons impenetrable to me.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19571108.2.41.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 952, 8 November 1957, Page 26
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186A Hitch in Time New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 952, 8 November 1957, Page 26
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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