THE WEEK’S RADIO Time Play By Priestley

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29734, 30 January 1962, Page 8

THE WEEK’S RADIO Time Play By Priestley

After his two amazingly successful early novels, “The Good Companions” and “Angel Pavement,” J. B. Priestley achieved immediate success in the theatre with “Dangerous Comer,” which will be heard in “Sunday Showcase” from the ZBs at 9.16 pan. on Sunday.

First produced by Tyrone Guthrie in 1932, “Dangerous Corner” is mainly a gallery of six character studies, but it also betrays Priestley’s interest in possible levels and compartments of time. He was much influenced by the ideas of J. W. Dunne (“Experiment with Time”) and Ouspensky, and he went on to develop them in “Time and the Conways’* and “I Have Been Here Before,” written in 1937.

“Dangerous Corner” has no story in the usual sense, but rather a group of characters whose story and personalities are unfolded bit by bit as one of them —Robert— probes deeper into a trivial misunderstanding about a cigarette box. Had Olwen seen it before, and where, and when? In spite of the wise Olwen’s hints and pleas, he insists that the truth be disclosed. In a series of dramatic scenes certain unpleasant truths about all the characters are disclosed. At the point when the tragic climax is reached, Priestley reverts to the opening scene again, and it is here that he uses his time device. He shows how human relationships can reach a dangerous corner, and speculates on the consequences of a return to the exact point in time at which an ensuing tragedy might have been averted, if an alternative course had been pursued.

Sunday’s N.Z.BS. production of “Dangerous Corner” was by Bernard Kearns, who also adapted the play for radio. He also plays the part of Robert. Others in the allChristchurch cast are Isobel Provan as Olwen, Mavis Reesby, Mildred Woods. Cynthia Ward, Heath Joyce and William Scannell. Hebrew Songs Stepan Wolpe, whose 10 Songs from the Hebrew will be heard in a programme from 3YC beginning at 7 p.m. on Thursday, was born in Berlin in 1902. Until 1935 he lived in Germany, where his teachers included Busoni, Webern and Hermann Seherchen, but in that year he ■went to Jerusalem. Until 1939, when he went to the United States, he lived in Jerusalem and his experiences there resulted in his Hebrew Songs, which were composed between 1936 and 1938. although they were not performed until 1949. Wolipe Isays of them: “They are not i the result of an analysis of | the folklore of the country, but when I was in that country I felt folklore which 1 heard there to be profoundly latent within me. The songs of the Yemenite Jews, the singing of Coptic monks and the Arabiv songs filled me with enchantment. To this day I cannot forget how the cadences of the languages there struck me, how the light of the sky, the smell of the country, the stones and the hills around Jerusalem, the power and the sinewy beauty of the , Hebrew’s language all turned into music which suddenly seemed to have a topographical character. It seemed new to me and yet I felt it as an • old source within me. The musical language is, naturally, related to a wider heritage than that which seems so purely instinctual. The whole orbit of the material, ranging from the diatonic to the hewer resources of musical language, yielded to my techniques of musical composition, which are, naturally, of contemporary origin.’’ The songs, which have both Hebrew and English texts, are reminiscent of both Israeli music and Webern in their melodic contours. They are sung by Arliine Carmen (contralto) and Leon Lishner i bass) with David Tudor at the piano. This recording is one of Columbia’s “Modem American Music” series, for which works that “represent American music at its most distinguihed and beautiful’’ are selected by a jury comprising the composers, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell and William Schumann, and the president of Columbia Records, Goddard Lieberson. “Song Of Eve” In 1898 Faure wrote incidental music for a London production of Maeterlinck’s "Pelleas and Melisande.” It is familiar in the form of a concert suite, but the score also contained a song for Melisande. Some seven years later Faure took up the material again and wrote a song “Crepuscule,” which is musically an extended version of Melisande’s song, with a different text—by Charles van Lerberghe. Then still attracted by van Lerberghe’s poety, he chose other poems from the same collection and composed a cycle of at first five and later If) songs. The cycle. “La Chanson d’Eve,’ was one of the finest accomplishment’s of Faure’s last period and one lof the finest of all song-cycles [The poems tell of the young iEve contemplating in wonder the newly-created universe, and becoming aware of an ; all-pervading divine presence. “The Song of Eve” may be heard, preceded by the “Pelleas and Melisande” incidental music, from 3YC at 10.5 p.m. on Sunday, sung by the mezzo-soprano, Irma Kolaml

The Harpsichord

The middle years of this century have seen a remarkable return to favour of the harpsichord, both in music which was written for it and as a means of expression for contemporary composers. Musicians began to realise that the harpsichord was not, as had been thought during the romantic era, a' primitive and obsolete forerunner of the piano, but an instrument in its own right, with its own distinctive qualities and limitations. Bach and Handel, it was realised, had not struggled along with a poor substitute for the modern piano. Nor had they somehow miraculously anticipated the piano; they had actually written with the harpsichord’s distinctive sounds in mind and they meant their music to be played on it. In the first of a series of three talks entitled “the Voice of the Harpsichord,’* from 3YA at 8.30 p.m. on Friday, Dr. Michael Toovey, of the University of Canterbury, outlines the particular characteristics of the instrument, of which he is one of New Zealand’s foremost exponents. In later talks, Dr. Toovey looks at the harpsichord music of Couperin and Rameau, and Bach and Handel.

Actor’s Memoirs Because he was a rather solitary boy, he used to playact for his own amusement, “always dressed up as something or other and putting in a lot of falling dead and rolling over,** says Sir

Ralph Richardson in the first episode of his broadcast memoirs, “On Looking Back,” which will be heard from 3YC at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday. Many other children do this sort of thing, but there was real significance in his love of acting, and It is not surprising that when at 17 he took a job in an insurance office he did not feel it was really the place for him. He realised that the theatre was his world after seeing Sir Frank Benson, the great Shakespearean actor, as Hamlet. Broadcasting his memoirs is a new departure for one who has spent so much of bis time enacting the adventures of others, for here he is entirely himself, telling of the great parts he has played and the background to them. English Pottery “The Potter’s Gift” (3YA, 8.29 p.m., Monday) is a quickmoving inquiry into the nature of the potter’s craft by Charles Parker, who wrote “Singing the Fishing.” Like most of his work, it is experimental in style, mingling speech, sound effects and music in a new way. It investigates the qualities that have gone to form the tradition of English pottery. Recordings were made at the College of Arts. Burslem, and in the houses and streets of Tunstall, Burslem and Hanley, the three townships which, with Longton and Fenton, once made up the group known as the ‘•Five Towns.” (Since 1910 they have all been part of the city of Stoke-on-Trent.)