By J. M. SYNGE
Characters :
In the kitchen of a cottage on an island off the West Coast of Ireland, Cathleen, a girl of about twenty, is kneading a cake of bread. She finishes it and puts it down in the pot-oven by the fire. then begins to spin at a wheel, while her mother, Maurya, is resting in an inner room. Her younger sister, Nora, puts her head in at the outer door.
DIDERS TO THE SEA was the second play written by J. M. Synge , the leading dramatist of the Irish literary Renaissance, and the greatest influence on the Abbey Theatre, of which he was a director from 1904 until his death in 1909. Published in 1905, in the same volume as The Shatlow of the Glen, it gave immediate occasion for the expectations which Syngo amply fulfilled two years later with The Playboy of the Western World. Riders to the Sea is a most poignant drama of the coast people whom Synge, who had lived on the Aran Islands, knew so well, and of whose speech ho made language as beautiful as any ever heard on the British stage.

Contributors

Unknown:: J. M. Synge
Written By:: J. M. Synge
Nora (Maurya's younger daughter):: Kathleen Stuart
Cathleen (Maurya's elder daughter):: Mary O'Farrell
Maurya (an old woman):: Clare Harris
Bartley (her son):: J Adrian Byrne
Colum (an old man):: S Creagh Henry

Source: Radio Times

21:30

A Pianoforte Recital

5GB Daventry (Experimental)

Tue 1^st Nov 1927, 21:30 on 5GB Daventry (Experimental)

View in Radio Times

By Mrs. Norman O'Neill

In half an hour we are to glance down the ages and hear typical pianoforte pieces of the last three centuries.

Domenico Scarlatti's bright and vigorous short pieces were written before the times of the modern four-Movement Sonata. In his day 'Sonata' was a term applied to an instrumental piece, as distinct from a 'Cantata,' or vocal piece. Scarlatti, born in the same year as Handel, met his contemporary at Venice and became his close friend and admirer. The two competed at Rome in keyboard performance. As Harpsichordists they tied, but on the Organ, Handel was declared the finer player.

Schumann's little piece is cast in 'Canon' form - that in which a tune is propounded by one voice or part, and echoed by one or more others, a few notes behind, all the way through.

A Hundred years ago people hardly thought of a Study as a piece for concert performance. A Study, as its name implies, was a technical exercise. Some particular feature in which pianists were likely to want practice would be taken and a little piece written round this feature, using it over and over again. What Chopin did may be stated in a few words. He took the dry exercise and turned it into poetry. Schumann, who championed Chopin's music so warmly, said of the Thirteenth Study (Op. 25, No. 1) that 'such things cannot be described, still less fitly praised.' Chopin himself, however, did describe it to a pupil. He said he thought of a little shepherd taking refuge in a peaceful grotto from an approaching storm.

Everyone knows Debussy's excellence in delicately imaginative and pictorial music. Most of his sketches are impressionistic, and we need little more than the title to help us to conjure up the scene which the composer has endeavoured to translate into musical terms. Whether he is recalling the sound of a steadily-falling, gentle rain shower, the glorious purple and fragrant scent of the heather, or the goldfish darting and splashing in their pool, lie stimulates the imagination with assured art.

It is probably not commonly known that Gustav Holst, composer of operas and colossal choral and orchestral works, set out as a boy to become a pianist, but was soon prevented by early signs of neuritis. He has written very little for the piano, so far as we know; but a few years ago was published this toccata, a brilliant and thoroughly pianistic piece founded on a tune for the Northumbrian Pipes. He gives the tune out absolutely unadorned, then subjects it to all kinds of racy, dashing treatment.