THE WEEK’S RADIO War Requiem At Wellington

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30190, 23 July 1963, Page 8

THE WEEK’S RADIO War Requiem At Wellington

The most important of a number of (xmcert broadcasts from 3YC this week promises to be the first New Zealand performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem under the direction of John Hopkins from Wellington. In this performance the National Orchestra will be joined by Angela Shaw <soprano), Peter Baillie (tenor) and Graeme Gorton (baritone) and the choirs of the Royal Christchurch Musical Society and St. Patrick’s College. »

Britten wrote- the War Requiem for last year’s Coventry Festival and since its first performance in the new Coventry Cathedral it has met with a success almost unknown to new works in this century. It has been performed in Britain, Ireland, Germany and Austria already, and the demand for a recording of the work was so great that the Decca company took the unusual ‘step of announcing the recording two months before it was due to appear. It seems that in producing this work, which is both a large-scale musical masterpiece and a withering indictment of the madness of war, Britten has answered a widely find deeply-felt need.

The reaction of critics to the work has been unanimously acclamatory. In. the “Daily Telegraph,” Donald Mitchell declared the War Requiem without reservation to be a masterpiece of the first order, and his opinion has been widely shared. The War Requiem is dedicated to four of Benjamin Britten’s friends who lost their lives in World War H. It is a setting of the Latin Mass for the dead, interspersed with poems'by Wilfred Owen, who was killed in France a week before the Armistice in 1918. The score is prefaced by a quotation from Owen's preface to the volume of his poems which he was preparing shortly before he was killed: ”My subject is War and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. . . . All a poet can do today is to war. That is why the true poets must be truthful.” Owen’s poems are sung as solos or in duet by the tenor and baritone soloists, accompanied by a chamber orchestra. The Latin text of the Requiem is sung by the solo soprano and the mixed choir accompanied by the full orchestra and by the distant Boys’ choir accompanied by the organ. The climax of the work, preceding the In Paradisum, comes in the setting of Owen’s last poem, “Strange Meeting,” in' which the two enemies, now dead, meet as friends and the dead German soldier addresses hia

English foe: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend . . . Let us sleep now ■ . .”

Chamber Music Other concert broadcasts this week include: Tonight—YCs, 9.25: The visiting Allegri Quartet plays string quartets by Mozart (No. 15 in D minor, K. 421), Shostakovich (No. 4 in D) and Beethoven (No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132). Wednesday.—3YC, 8.30 p.m.: The Budapest Quartet plays Mozart’s Quartet No. 18 in A, K. 464, and Hindemith’s Quartet in E-fiat. Sunday.—Main nationals, 4 pm.: Guy Fallot (cello) and J anetta McStay (piano) play Martinu’s Cello Sonata No. 2 and Suite Francaise by Paul Bazelaire. Spanish Songs After the programme by Guy Falkrt and Janetta McStay on Sunday, listeners will hear the first New Zealand playing of a new record by the celebrated young Spanish mezzo-soprano, Teresa Berganza. She sings songs by the Spanish composer®, Jesus Guridi, Turina. Granados and Felix Lavilla—her husband and her accompanist in this recording. Restoration Comedy One of the last Restoration comedies was “The Beaux’ Stratagem,” which George Farquhar wrote on his deathbed in 1707. It is a lighthearted play, with all the charm, wit, sauciness and ingenious contrivance of the period, but it also con tains, a quite serious argument that incompatibility of temperament should be grounds for divorce. Farquhar borrowed both the argument and many of the striking phrases used to support it from a pamphlet written by John Milton. The play concerns two young men of fashion, Aimwell and Archer, who arrive at a coaching inn in search of a rich wife for one of them, so that both can share her fortune. Archer poses as his friend’s servant and so is able to flirt witH Cherry, the innkeeper’s pretty daughter, as well as attracting young Mrs Sullen, who is married to a drunken sot and finds Archer much more to her liking. Meanwhile Aimwell pursues the wealthy beaqty needed to bring the beaux’ stratagem to a successful conclusion. A 8.8. C. World Theatre production of “The Beaux’ Stratagem” will be heard from 3YC at 7.30 p.m. on Friday. ‘Fra Diavolo”

Auber’s opdra “Fra Diavolo” is, probably best known nowadays as the basis of the famous Laurel and Hardy film. In fact that comic masterpiece did not depart greatly in its essentials from Scribe’s libretto for Auber, whose music, as those who have seen the film may have guessed, has great charm and vitality. “Fra Diavolo,” first produced in 1830, was long one of the most popular of French operas comiques, and it still holds the stage in France. A rare opportunity to hear the opera in full will come at 9 p.m. on Friday when a recording emanating from the Dresden State Opera will be broadcast. Most of the action takes place at a country inn annd the most famous scene in the opera is one where the innkeeper’s daughter, Zerlina, prepares for bed, watched from a closet by the notorious bandit, Fra Diavolo, and his two companions, Giacomo and Beppo. Famous Advocate Six famous cases of Lord Birkett (1883-1962) are reconstructed by Edgar Lustgarten in a new 8.8. C. series entitled "Advocate Extraordinary,” beginning from the main national station* at 9.30 a.m. on Sunday. Lord Birkett, who ended his great legal career as Lord Justice of Appeal, was in his earlier days both Bn outstanding criminal defender and a leading civil advocate. "Throughout a legal generation, with his friend and rival, Patrick Hastings, he dominated fashionable special jury work” and “gained so many acquittals on sensational murder charges that he dominated that sphere without any rival at all.” says Lustgarten. Five of the six cases are murder trials—three he successfully defended, one he lost, and one he prosecuted successfully. The sixth case is the Gladstone libel suit.