Auckland Piano Students' Association

Radio Record, Volume V, Issue 6, 21 August 1931, Page 8

Auckland Piano Students' Association

To be Heard from 1YA Next Week

FW Auckland Piano Students’ Association, which will provide an evening’s entertainment at 1YA on Thursday, August 27, is now in the third year of its existence, and continues to justify its place in the Auckland musical world. In addition to the study of pianoforte works by the members, a series of lectures embracing a wide field of musical interest is contributed to the fortnightly meetings by eminent visitors and local musicians. The association has lately acquired a comprehensive and valuable library of piano music, four and eight-hand works as well as solo compositions. With such material at hand the prospects for future work are reassuring. A gratifying testimony to the suecess of the A.P.S.A. is the recent formation of a Students’ Association in Hamilton, which proposes to affiliate with the Auckland body. An interchange of ideas and music cannot fail to be of mutua) benefit. A feature of the programme to be broadeast from 1YA will be ex amples of two-piano work in which the association specialises. An Interesting Selection. F particular interest on the piogramme will be "The Warriurs," by Percy Grainger. This is the music tu an imaginary ballet written originally for orchestra and three pianos, anit "dished up" (the composer’s own words) for two pianos, six hands, by the composer. Probably listeners wilt hear it for the first time and opinions as to the merits will doubtless be considerably divided, ultra-modern as it is in construction. Some passages are cer-

tainly unique. The "imaginary ballet" conceived by the composer presents a pageant in which the ghosts of male and female warrior types of all times and places are spirited together for an orgy of warlike dances, processions, and merry-makings, broken or accompanied by amorous interludes; their frolics tinged with just that faint suspicion of wistfulness all holiday gladness wears. In the finale he imagines them all gathered-a sort of Valhalla-old Greek heroes, black Zulus, flaxen-haired Vik-

ings, lithe Amazons, squat Greenland women, Red Indians, Fijiams, and graceful cannibal Polynesians-all arm in arm in a united show of gay, innocent: pride, and animal spirits, fierce and exultant.