MUSIC NOTES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1598, 9 December 1920, Page 36

MUSIC NOTES.

(By

“G” - String.)

During more than half his life, Bolto, poet-composer of “Mefistofele,” was engaged, on and off, upon an opera of his own libretto, entitled “Nero.” This tragic work is now promised for production at the La Scala, Milan, next year, under the conductorship of Arluro Toscanini. The famous conductor has secured a grant of seven million lire from the city of Milan for the spectacular staging, which involves the entire reconstruction of the stage. Everyone with pretensions to be a violinist knows James Tubbs, of Soho, London, England’s famous violin bow maker. Tubbs is eighty-five years old, and is still making fiddlebows for the great violinists of the world. His great-grandfather was the first of the Tubbs line to make fiddlebows. He was making them two hundred years ago, and at that remote period a Tubbs violin bow was regarded as the best obtainable in the world. There are great violinists ’ of

to-day who refuse to play without a Tubbs violin bow. Unfortunately the present James Tubbs is the last of the line. Private advices have been received from Italy that the well-known Wellington flautist and conductor, Mr. Alf. P. Truda, who recently returned to his native land with a view to studying voice production, is at present at Naples, under Professor Conti and the great tenor de Lucia, both maestros at the Liceo Musicale di Napoli. Signor Truda is looking forward to a great musical treat during the coming grand opera season, after which he expects to return to the Dominion early in 1921.