Exceptional entertainers

Press, 3 August 1981, Page 14

Exceptional entertainers

Peter Harcourt presents a personal view of 13 exceptional entertainers on the National Radio. This week's subject at 8.00 tonight is . Michael Flanders of the famous Flanders and Swann revue team. It is appropriate in the Year of the Disabled to mention that Flanders worked from a wheelchair for many years, captivating audiences world wide with his wit and nonchalant humour. Along with some personal memories of this great actor and raconteur, Peter Harcourt will introduce some recordings of Flanders’s performances. Piano recital Michael Redshaw is a young New Zealand pianist who has been making a name for himself on the British musical scene. Back in New Zealand at present, he is touring in recital for the Music Federation. From a Napier piano recital he is giving on Concert tonight at 8.00 he can be heard playing music by Mozart and Debussy. First there is Mozart's Fantasia and Sonata in C . minor, K.475/457, then a Debussy selection that includes La File aux cheveux de lin and La Puerto del Vino.

Composers “Beethoven and the Shroud of Silence" is the title the broadcaster and music critic, Owen Jensen, has given to the third in his short series of programmes built around the deaths of famous composers. Owen Jensen has written and presents the programme. Concert, 9.00 tonight. Jazz From Wellington, Rodger Fox conducts his own Big Band in this, the final of the current series of “Jazz Tonight" on National at 9.15. Fox’s Big Band is now touring European, jazz festivals, after having been invited to represent New Zealand at the Montreux Festival for the second year running. The band made a smash hit in Hong Kong at a stop-over concert. Soprano The famous operatic soprano, Dame Joan Hammond, here to judge the final of the 1981 Mobil Song Quest, is also conducting master classes for New Zealand singers and their teachers in Auckland and Christchurch. Today at 10.30 a.m. on Concert her Auckland master

class is being broadcast direct from the Maidment Theatre. This is the first time that Radio New Zealand has broadcast such a master class live. Radio play Bruce Stewart's radio play “The Sparks Flies Upwards" describes the strange happenings that actually occurred in the French parish of the Cure d'Ars in the Pays de Dombes some 130 years ago. The simple folk of the Pays de Dombes called the Devil “Le Grappin." The unaccountable “phenomena" evidencing themselves in the life of the Cure d'Ars ceased entirely some five years before his death in 1859 and there has never been an adequate explanation for them. An investigator from the society for the Investigation of Astral Energies is sent from Paris to investigate the unexplained events which range from a simple gate banging without wind to a full-scale meteorite shower. The walls shake, and burst into flames, there is whirlwind in the kitchen and children are possessed; ghostly carriages drive through the walls. An unusual piece of radio is made even more incredible by the

fact the events are actually documented. Peter Vere Jones plays the Cure and Jeremy Stevens “Le Grappin" in this R.N.Z. production of "As the Sparks Fly Upwards." Concert, 9.43 p.m. Chopin Sketches of what Chopin referred to as his Third Piano Concerto were presumed lost until a contemporary Polish musician came upon them in Warsaw after the Second World War. He orchestrated this second piano part. It proved an effective “Allegro Maestoso" movement in A, music still little known in this orchestral guise and only slightly more often heard is the solo version Chopin himself wrote later as the 0p.46 “Allegro de Concert." On tnight's Concert Programme at 9.30 the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 3 in A is broadcast for the first time here. It was recorded in May this year by the New Zealand Symphony with Steuart Bedford conducting and the pianist soloist Roger Woodward. Chopin had begun this "Allegro Maestoso” movement in 1830, completing it in the customary two piano version in 1832.