AUSTRALIA v. ENGLAND
Mr. A. F. KIPPAX : An Eye-witness Account of the day's play in the second Test Match.
Relayed from The Melbourne Cricket Ground.

At The Organ of The Beaufort Cinema, Wash-wood Heath, Birmingham
(From Birmingham)

From The Regal, Marble Arch

Freda Townson (Contralto)
The Grimson Piano Quartet: Ethel Hobday (Pianoforte); Jessie Grimson (Violin); Dorothy Jones (Viola); Robert Grimson (Violoncello)
Richard Strauss has made an interesting confession as to his methods of composing songs; these methods would not seem to differ from those employed by the majority of song-writers who take their art seriously, but are none the less revealing. 'For some time,' he says, 'I may have no impulse to compose at all. Then one evening I find myself turning the leaves of a volume of poetry; a poem will strike my eye. I read it through; it agrees with the mood I am in; and at once the appropriate music is instinctively fitted to it. I am in a musical frame of mind, and all I want is the right poetic vessel into which to pour my ideas. If good luck throws this in my way, a satisfactory song results.' Hugo Wolf had other methods and other stimuli. He differed from predecessors and from most of his contemporaries in the fact of being equally poet and musician. He was the first composer to regard the poem as an integral part of the whole and of equal importance with the music. He did not make his appeal through the music alone, but set his poem so that note for note, bar for bar, and phrase for phrase, the music interpreted the poem end the poem supplemented the music. He did not write for the voice accompanied by the piano, but for the voice and piano as an inseparable whole. Wolf's greatness lies not only in the beauty of the music of his songs, but in his supreme faculty of piercing to the very heart or a poem and finding there the music that he sought. He had something of the temperament of Schubert in his capacity for work. When the fit was on him he would compose songs in great number at great speed - two or three a week for months on end. In two years he wrote two hundred, almost without stopping, and then, as though exhausted and empty of all ideas, he composed absolutely nothing for three whole years.

Directed by Guy Daines
(From Glasgow)
Schumann's hundred and odd songs were written practically all in one year, the year before his marriage. They are nearly all love songs and bear strong evidence of his obsession with thoughts of his betrothed. Schumann as a song-writer is in a direct line from Schubert ; he shows the same devotion to melody: but he had a cultivated literary sense that Schubert lacked, and he was, therefore, more nearly able to express the poet in his music; moreover, as the songs of a pianist, Schumann's songs are pianistically - but only in that respect - in advance of Schubert's. The main point of difference between them lies in the fact that Schubert, throughout his life, could not help pouring out songs without ceasing, whereas Schumann, being married, closed an incident in his career with the statement: 'I cannot venture to promise that I shall produce anything further in the way of songs, and am satisfied with that I have done'; and he was, indeed, satisfied. He writes to a friend expressing his distress that he is placed by a critic in the second rank of song-writers; 'I do not ask,' he wrote, 'to stand in the first rank, but I think I have some pretension to a place of my own.'
Grieg's claim to a place in the company of great song-writers is affected by his limitations; nearly all the one hundred and fifty songs that he wrote are seldom more than compact lyrics embraced within a single idea, or merely stretched upon a simple but unusual harmonic frame. His expressive and piquantly characteristic melody. attached to his novel and individual sense of harmony, give to Grieg's songs, however, a charm which it is often impossible to withstand.
(From Scottish Regional)

Mr. BASIL DE SELINCOURT