ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENTS Radio: Blake Songs And ‘Albert Herring’

Press, Issue 30997, 1 March 1966, Page 11

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENTS Radio: Blake Songs And ‘Albert Herring’

While the New Zealand Opera Company was staging its first big production of 1966, “We Want an Orchestra,” and Fred Turnosky was singing the ".Monstrous treatment” aria, some members of the chorus were passing the word around that the next production would be of Benjamin Britten's "Albert Herring.”

This was good news for “Albert Herring” is a lovely work, and certainly one of the best comic operas produced in the iast 40 years. Here, it seemed, was some enterprise being shown and. regardless of the directors’ carry on, as the work only required 13 instruments it would not matter whether the company begged, borrowed or stole the men for the pit. However, the company was only examining the possibility of producing "Albert Herring” at the Auckland Festival with the Auckland Symphonia, there were all sorts of if.s and buts to its reaching Wellington, and the South Island only figured in the plans to the extent of a back-country rehearsal version of “La Boheme.”

It looked like a red herring.

So it’s back to canned Herring. A new recording of the opera, conducted by the com-

poser, will be broadcast from 3YC on Sunday evening. “Albert Herring” has a libretto by Eric Crozier based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant “Le rosier de Madame Husson.” It was first produced in Glyndebourne in June, 1947. Like the best of comedy it touches on deeper issues and Britten’s all-pervading theme of the loss of innocence is the main one.

Lady Billows of Suffolk, producing a May Day festival, offers a prize for a May Queen whose virtue is beyond doubt. Since maidenheads are hard to find, there is no queen and Lady Billows determines to have a May King in the person of Albert Herring. When a practical joker fills Herring’s lemonade with rum, the May King becomes tight and disappears into the night in search of desreputable pleasures. Where the cynical Maupassant’s Isidore had eight days on the French country town and returned fatally wrecked, Albert has but a night and returns the next morning to the festival dishevelled, haggard, and proud.

“Albert Herring” is now performed widely, being particularly successful in Germany’s network of municipal opera houses, although Britten says the Germans are apt to play it for mere knocka-

bout farce instead of seeing serious characters in comic situations. It was one of the successes of the English Opera Group’s Soviet tour in 1964.

SONG CYCLE A recent work by Britten will also be broadcast this week, “Songs and Proverbs of William Blake,” from 3YC tomorrow evening. The cycle is sung by Dietrich FischerDieskau with the composer at the piano, and it was recorded at last year’s Aldeburgh Festival.

Britten had previously set some of Blackie’s “Songs of Innocence” to music. This time he has set some “Songs of Experience,” bitter and disturbing. Each of the seven songs is ironical or melancholy in content and all but one are introduced by one of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.”

The songs are about the miseries of London, the pious parents who are proud of their chimney-sweeper son, the lethal poisontree of wrath, the terrible predatory tiger, the defencless fly, the sunflower hankering for the sun, and finally the ambivalent image of God, as light to the oppressed, but as fellow-man to the privileged. The whole cycle is constructed, with extraordinary inventive diversity, out of the four-note figure presented in the piano’s introduction to the first proverb.