GERTRUDE JOHNSON (Soprano)
ORREA PERNEL (Violin)
THE WIRELESS ORCHESTRA Conducted by JOHN ANSELL
IN this, the fourth and last of his Symphonic Poems, Saint-
Saens takes for his hero Hercules, one of whose exploits had formed the subject of his earlier orchestral work, Omphale's Spinning Wheel.
He prints in his score the outline of the ' plot.' Mythology tells, lie says, how Hercules in early years saw two paths in life-that of dalliance in pleasure, and that of virtue. Indifferent to the seductions of nymphs and bacchantes, the hero chooses the way of struggle and combat, at the end of which be discerns through the flames of the funeral pyre the reward of immortality.
A BOUT fifty years ago Ponchielli promised to rival
Verdi as a composer of Italian Opera. After a few years, however, ho advanced no further, and he died when ho was little over fifty.
His most successful Opera was La Gioconda , whose plot is of the usual somewhat lurid type fashionable at that time.
We are to have the Dance of the Hours, a spectacular Ballet, which occurs in the Third Act. The Ballet represents successively dawn, day, evening, and night. It is also intended to symbolize the eternal struggle between the powers of darkness and light.
THE Carnival Overture is one of three works originally intended by Dvorak to be movements of a Symphony, and afterwards called ' Overtures.' This one was evidently to supply the Scherzo' movement of the Symphony. Various ' readings ' have been put into it ; but any listener can conjure up the scene of Carnival gaiety and pick out his Harlequin and Columbine and the rest of them. Another interpretation is that this Overture suggests Youth, the carnival time of life.
5.15 Missionary Talk: In the Wake of Captain
Cook,' hy the Rev. HENRY BOND JAMES , of Raratonga, Cook Islands, South Seas. S.B.from Cardiff
THIS is the bicentenary year of the birth of Captain James Cook , and much has been written about his voyages of discovery in the South Seas. It is amongst these islands that this evening's talker, Mr. Bond James, of the London Missionary Society (who, by the way, is a Cardiganshire man, ordained at Clydach Vale), has worked for nearly a quarter of a century, tho last ten years of which ho has spent at Raratonga, the chief of the islands that still bear Cook's name.