STAGE FOLK

Evening Star, Issue 22817, 27 November 1937, Page 6

STAGE FOLK

The performance of Mendelssohn’s G minor piano concerto at the Orchestral Society’s jubilee concert next Wednesday will be welcome to all admirers of this very loveable composer. Mendelssohn has undergone _ many vicissitudes —he was lionised during his lifetime and suffered a reverse after his death, many of the modern generation dismissing him and his music as part and parcel of the Victorian era. "But if Mendelssohn was not a very great composer, he at least wrote works that can stand proudly beside any others (one is thinking here of the ■ t * « Fingai’s Cave ’ . overture and the ‘ Midsummer Night’s, Dream ’ music), and his symphonic works are eminently pleasurable to hear. The G minor concerto,' which Mrs Campbell will play and Dr Griffiths will conduct at the above concert, is a work that still retains all its beauty and freshness, especially in sparkling movement which concludes it. Gifted, with . one of the > loveliest speaking voices on the English stage, Fay Compton, one of London s favourite actresses, has come to Australia to exercise the charm that has kept English stage devotees at her feet for many years. Her engagement is a real achievement for Messrs J. C. Williamson, for Miss Compton is an actress who can ill be spared from the British stage, but she has always wished to visit the colonies, a and after her Australian season she is to commence a Dominion tour at Auckland <m January 27. The repertoire of this charming Englishwoman (who, by the way, comes of a famous theatrical family) will include Laurence Housman’s ‘Victoria Regina,’- in which Miss Compton plays Queen Victoria, and handsome Bruno Barnabe, another famous London artist, is her Consort. Also in the company are Ann Codrington and her famous husband, Stafford' Hilliard (parents of Patricia Hilliard, the lovely English film star recently seen in New Zealand in ‘ Farewell •Again-’). Miss Compton’s visit to Australia is proving something in the nature of a revelation to audiences, who have seldom heard such perfect, diction or watched a lovelier actress at work. The plays are staged_ handsomely, and the authentic settings in each will appeal to connoisseurs.